(no subject)

[babyfacedkiller]

 Chapter 16

 

A day later, on June 23, a big white Connie was roaring north on US 180, in another part of the country. It was doing somewhere between ninety and one hundred, its Corinthian white paint job glittering in the sun, the chrome winking. The opera windows in the rear also gave back the sun, heliographing it viciously.

 

The trail that Connie had left behind itself since Poke and Lloyd killed its owner and stole it somewhere just south of Hachita was wandering and pretty much senseless. Up 81 to US 80, the turnpike, until Poke and Lloyd began to feel nervous. They had killed six people in the last six days, including the owner of the Continental, his wife, and his smarmy daughter. But it was not the six murders that made them feel antsy about being on the interstate. It was the dope and the guns. Five grams of hash, a little tin snuffbox filled with God knew how much coke, and sixteen pounds of marijuana. Also two .38s, three .45s, a .357 Mag that Poke called his Pokerizer, six shotguns—two of them sawed-off pumps—and a Schmeisser submachine gun. Murder was a trifle beyond their intellectual reach, but they both understood the trouble they were going to be in if the Arizona State Police picked them up in a stolen car full of blow and shootin irons. On top of everything else, they were interstate fugitives. Had been ever since they crossed the Nevada border.

 

Interstate fugitives. Lloyd Henreid liked the sound of that. Gangbusters. Take that, you dirty rat. Have a lead sandwich, ya lousy copper.

 

So they had turned north at Deming, now on 180; had gone through Hurley and Bayard and the slightly larger town of Silver City, where Lloyd had bought a bag of burgers and eight milkshakes (why in the name of Christ had he bought eight of the motherfuckers? they would soon be pissing chocolate), grinning at the waitress in an empty yet hilarious way that made her nervous for hours afterward. I believe that man would just as soon killed me as looked at me, she told her boss that afternoon.

 

Past Silver City and roaring through Cliff, the road now bending west again, just the direction they didn’t want to go. Through Buckhorn and then they were back in the country God forgot, two-lane blacktop running through sagebrush and sand, buttes and mesas in the background, all that same old same old made you want to just rare back and puke at it.

 

“We’re gettin low on gas,” Poke said.

 

“Wouldn’t be if you didn’t drive so fuckin fast,” Lloyd said. He took a sip of his third milkshake, gagged on it, powered down the window, and threw out all the leftover crap, including the three milkshakes neither of them had touched.

 

“Whoop! Whoop!” Poke cried. He began to goose the gas pedal. The Connie lurched forward, dropped back, lurched forward.

 

“Ride em cowboy!” Lloyd yelled.

 

“Whoop! Whoop!”

 

“You want to smoke?”

 

“Smoke em if you got em,” Poke said. “Whoop! Whoop!”

 

There was a large green Hefty bag on the floor between Lloyd’s feet. It held the sixteen pounds of marijuana. He reached in, got a handful, and began to roll a bomber joint.

 

“Whoop! Whoop!” The Connie cruised back and forth over the white line.

 

“Cut the shit!” Lloyd shouted. “I’m spillin it everywhere!”

 

“Plenty more where that came from… whoop!”

 

“Come on, we gotta deal this stuff, man. We gotta deal this stuff or we’re gonna get caught and wind up in somebody’s trunk.”

 

“Okay, sport.” Poke began to drive smoothly again, but his expression was sulky. “It was your idea, your fuckin idea.”

 

“You thought it was a good idea.”

 

“Yeah, but I didn’t know we’d end up drivin all over fuckin Arizona. How we ever gonna get to New York this way?”

 

“We’re throwin off pursuit, man,” Lloyd said. In his mind he saw police garage doors opening and thousands of 1940s radio cars issuing forth into the night. Spotlights crawling over brick walls. Come on out, Canarsie, we know you’re in there.

 

“Good fuckin luck,” Poke said, still sulking. “We’re doin a helluva job. You know what we got, besides that dope and the guns? We got sixteen bucks and three hundred fuckin credit cards we don’t dare use. What the fuck, we don’t even have enough cash to fill this hog’s gas tank.”

 

“God will provide,” Lloyd said, and spit-sealed the bomber. He lit it with the Connie’s dashboard lighter. “Happy fuckin days.”

 

“And if you want to sell it, what are we doing smokin it?” Poke went on, not much mollified by the thought of God providing.

 

“So we sell a few short ounces. Come on, Poke. Have a smoke.”

 

This never failed to break Poke up. He brayed laughter and took the joint. Between them, standing on its wire stock, was the Schmeisser, fully loaded. The Connie blazed on up the road, its gas gauge standing at an eighth.

 

Poke and Lloyd had met a year before in the Brownsville Minimum Security Station, a Nevada work farm. Brownsville was ninety acres of irrigated farmland and a prison compound of Quonset huts about sixty miles north of Tonopah and eighty northeast of Gabbs. It was a mean place to do short time. Although Brownsville Station was supposed to be a farm, nothing much grew there. Carrots and lettuce got one taste of that blaring sun, chuckled weakly, and died. Legumes—and weeds would grow, and the state legislature was fanatically dedicated to the idea that someday soybeans would grow. But the kindest thing that could be said about Brownsville’s ostensible purpose was that the desert was taking a Christless long time to bloom. The warden (who preferred to be called “the boss”) prided himself on being a hardass, and he hired only men he considered to be fellow hardasses. And, as he was fond of telling the new fish, Brownsville was mostly minimum security because when it came to escape, it was like the song said: noplace to run to, baby, noplace to hide. Some gave it a shot anyway, but most were brought back in two or three days, sunburned, glareblind, and eager to sell the boss their shriveled raisin souls for a drink of water. Some of them cackled madly, and one young man who was out for three days claimed he saw a large castle some miles south of Gabbs, a castle with a moat. The moat, he said, was guarded by trolls riding big black horses. Some months later when a Colorado revival preacher did a show at Brownsville, this same young man got Jesus in a big way.

 

Andrew “Poke” Freeman, in for simple assault, was released in April 1989. He had occupied a bed next to Lloyd Henreid, and had told him that if Lloyd was interested in a big score, he knew about something interesting in Vegas. Lloyd was willing.

 

Lloyd was released on June 1. His crime, committed in Reno, had been attempted rape. The lady was a showgirl on her way home, and she had shot a load of teargas into Lloyd’s eyes. He felt lucky to get only two to four, plus time served, plus time off for good behavior. At Brownsville it was just too fuckin hot to misbehave.

 

He caught a bus to Las Vegas, and Poke met him at the terminal: This is the deal, Poke told him. He knew this guy, “one-time business associate” might describe him best, and this guy was known in certain circles as Gorgeous George. He did some piecework for a group of people with mostly Italian and Sicilian names. George was strictly part-time help. What he did mostly for these Sicilian-type people was to take things and bring things. Sometimes he took things from Vegas to L.A.; sometimes he brought other things from L.A. to Vegas. Small-time dope mostly, freebies for big-time customers. Sometimes guns. The guns were always a bring, never a take. As Poke understood it (and Poke’s understanding never got much beyond what the movie people call “soft focus”), these Sicilian-type people sometimes sold iron to independent thieves. Well, Poke said, Gorgeous George was willing to tell them the time and place when a fairly good haul of these items would be in the offing. George was asking twenty-five percent of what they realized. Poke and Lloyd would crash in on George, tie him and gag him, take the stuff, and maybe give him a couple of biffs and baffs for good measure. It had to look good, George had cautioned, because these Sicilian-type people were no one to fool around with.

 

“Well,” Lloyd said, “it sounds good.”

 

The next day Poke and Lloyd went to see Gorgeous George, a mild-mannered six-footer with a small head which sat incongruously above his roofbeam shoulders on a neck which did not seem to exist. He had a full head of waved blond hair, which made him look a bit like the famed wrestler.

 

Lloyd had had second thoughts about the deal, but Poke had changed his mind again. Poke was good at that. George told them to come around to his house the following Friday evening around six. “Wear masks, for God’s sake,” he said. “And you bloody my nose and black my eye, too. Jesus, I wish I’d never gotten into this.”

 

The big night came. Poke and Lloyd took a bus to the corner of George’s street and put on ski-masks at the foot of his walk. The door was locked, but as George had promised, not too tightly locked. There was a rumpus room downstairs, and there was George, standing in front of a Hefty bag full of pot. The Ping-Pong table was loaded down with guns. George was scared.

 

“Jesus, oh Jesus, I wish I’d never gotten into this,” he kept saying as Lloyd tied his feet with clothesrope and Poke bound his hands with Scotch brand filament tape.

 

Then Lloyd biffed George in the nose, bloodying it, and Poke baffed him in the eye, blacking it as per request.

 

“Jeez!” George cried. “Did you have to do it so hard?”

 

“You were the one wanted to make sure it looked good,” Lloyd pointed out. Poke plastered a piece of adhesive tape across George’s mouth. The two of them had begun to gather up the swag.

 

“You know something, old buddy?” Poke said, pausing.

 

“Nope,” Lloyd said, giggling nervously. “Not a thing.”

 

“I wonder if ole George there can keep a secret.”

 

For Lloyd, this was a brand-new consideration. He stared thoughtfully at Gorgeous George for a long hard minute. George’s eyes bugged back at him in sudden terror.

 

Then Lloyd said, “Sure. It’s his ass too.” But he sounded as uneasy as he felt. When certain seeds are planted, they nearly always grow.

 

Poke smiled. “Oh, he could just say, ‘Hey guys. I met this old friend and his buddy. We shot the shit for a while, had a few beers, and what do you think, the sonsofbitches came over to the house and took me off. Sure hope you catch em. Lemme tell you what they look like.’”

 

George was shaking his head wildly, his eyes capital Os of terror.

 

The guns were by then in a heavy canvas laundry sack they had found in the downstairs bathroom. Now Lloyd hefted the bag nervously and said, “Well, what do you think we ought to do?”

 

“I think we ought to pokerize him, ole buddy,” Poke said regretfully. “Only thing we can do.”

 

Lloyd said, “That seems awful hard, after he put us onto this.”

 

“Hard old world, buddy.”

 

“Yeah,” Lloyd sighed, and they walked over to George.

 

“Mph,” George said, shaking his head wildly. “Mmmmmnh! Mmmmph! ”

 

“I know,” Poke soothed him. “Bitch, ain’t it? I’m sorry, George, no shit. It ain’t a bit personal. Want you to ‘member that. Catch on his head, Lloyd.”

 

That was easier said than done. Gorgeous George was whipping his head wildly from side to side. He was sitting in the corner of his rumpus room and the walls were cinderblock and he kept rapping his head against them. Didn’t even seem to feel it.

 

“Catch him,” Poke said serenely, and ripped another piece of tape from the roll.

 

Lloyd at last got him by the hair and managed to hold him still long enough for Poke to slap the second strip of adhesive neatly across George’s nose, thereby sealing all of his tubes. George went purely crazy. He rolled out of the corner, bellywhopped, and then lay there, humping the floor and making muffled sounds which Lloyd supposed were supposed to be screams. Poor old fellow. It went on for almost five minutes before George was completely still. He bucked and scrabbled and thumped. His face got as red as the side of old Dad’s barn. The last thing he did was to lift both legs eight or ten inches straight up off the floor and bring them down with a crash. It reminded Lloyd of something he had seen in a Bugs Bunny cartoon or something, and he chuckled a little, feeling a bit cheered up. Up until then it had been sort of gruesome to see.

 

Poke squatted beside George and felt for his pulse.

 

“Well?” Lloyd said.

 

“Nothin tickin but his watch, ole buddy,” Poke said. “Speakin of which…” He lifted George’s meaty arm and looked at his wrist. “Naw, just a Timex. I was thinkin it might be a Casio, somethin like that.” He let George’s arm drop.

 

George’s car keys were in his front pants pocket. And in an upstairs cupboard they found a Skippy peanut butter jar half filled with dimes, and they took those, too. There was twenty dollars and sixty cents in dimes.

 

George’s car was a wheezy old Mustang with a four on the floor and lousy shocks and tires that were as bald as Telly Savalas. They left Vegas on US 93 and went southeast into Arizona. By noon of the next day, day before yesterday, they had skirted Phoenix on the back roads. Yesterday around nine they had stopped at a dusty old general store two miles beyond Sheldon on Arizona Highway 75. They knocked over the store and pokerized the proprietor, an elderly gentleman with mail-order false teeth. They got sixty-three dollars and the old dudemar’s pickup truck.

 

The pickup truck had blown two tires this morning. Two tires at the same time, and neither of them could find any tacks or nails on the road at all, although they spent nearly half an hour looking, swapping a bomber joint back and forth as they did so. Poke finally said it must have been a coincidence. Lloyd said he had heard of stranger things, by God. Then along came the white Connie, like an answer to their prayers. They had crossed the state line from Arizona into New Mexico earlier on, although neither of them knew it, and so they had become meat for the FBI.

 

The Connie’s driver had pulled over, leaned out, and said: “Need any help?”

 

“Sure do,” Poke had said, and pokerized the guy right on the spot. Got him dead-bang between the eyes with the .357 Mag. Poor sucker probably never even knew what had hit him.

 

“Why don’t you turn here?” Lloyd said, pointing to the junction coming up. He was pleasantly stoned.

 

“Sure could,” Poke said cheerfully. He let the Connie’s speed drop from eighty to sixty. Drifted it to the left, right wheels barely leaving the ground, and then a new piece of road was unrolling in front of them. Route 78, due west. And so, not knowing they had ever left it or that they were now the perpetrators of what the newspapers were calling a TRI-STATE KILL-SPREE, they reentered Arizona.

 

About an hour later a sign came up on their right: BURRACK 6.

 

“Burlap?” Lloyd said foggily.

 

“Burrack,” Poke said, and began twisting the Connie’s wheel so that the car made big graceful loops back and forth across the road. “Whoop! Whoop!”

 

“You want to stop there? I’m hungry, man.”

 

“You’re always hungry.”

 

“Fuck you. When I get stoned, I get the munchies.”

 

“You can munch my nine-inch hogleg, how’s that? Whoop! Whoop!”

 

“Seriously, Poke. Let’s stop.”

 

“Okay. Got to get some cash, too. We’ve thrown off enough fuckin pursuit for a while. We got to get some money and shag ass north. This desert shit makes no sense to me.”

 

“Okay,” Lloyd said. He didn’t know if it was the dope working on him or what, but all of a sudden he felt paranoid as hell, even worse than when they had been on the turnpike. Poke was right. Stop outside this Burrack and pull a score like they had outside of Sheldon. Get some money and some gas station maps, ditch this fuckin Connie for something that would blend into the scenery, then head north and east by the secondary roads. Get the fuck out of Arizona.

 

“I’ll tell you the truth, man,” Poke said. “All of a sudden I feel as nervous as a longtail cat in a room fulla rockin chairs.”

 

“I know what you mean, jellybean,” Lloyd said gravely, and then it hit them both funny and they broke up.

 

Burrack was a wide place in the road. They shot through it and on the other side was a combination café, store, and gas station. There was an old Ford wagon and a dust-streaked Olds with a horse trailer behind it in the dirt parking lot. The horse stared out at them as Poke wheeled the Connie in.

 

“This looks like just the ticket,” Lloyd said.

 

Poke agreed. He reached into the back for the .357 and checked the loads. “You ready?”

 

“I guess so,” Lloyd said, and took hold of the Schmeisser.

 

They walked across the baked parking lot. The police had known who they were for four days now; they had left their fingerprints all over Gorgeous George’s house, and in the store where the old man with the mail-order dentures had been pokerized. The old man’s pickup had been found within fifty feet of the bodies of the three people who belonged with the Continental, and it seemed reasonable to assume that the men who had killed Gorgeous George and the store owner had also killed these three. If they had been listening to the Connie’s radio instead of the tape-player, they would have known that Arizona and New Mexico police were coordinating the largest manhunt in forty years, all for a couple of small-time grifters who could not quite comprehend what they might have done to start such a fuss.

 

The gas was self-service; the clerk had to turn on the pump. So they went up the steps and inside. Three aisles of canned goods went up the room toward the counter. At the counter a man in cowboy clothes was paying for a pack of smokes and half a dozen Slim Jims. Halfway down the middle aisle a tired-looking woman with coarse black hair was trying to decide between two brands of spaghetti sauce. The place smelled of stale licorice and sun and tobacco and age. The proprietor was a freckled man in a gray shirt. He was wearing a company cap that said SHELL in red letters against a white field. He looked up as the screen door slapped shut and his eyes widened.

 

Lloyd put the wire stock of the Schmeisser against his shoulder and fired a burst at the ceiling. The two hanging lightbulbs shattered like bombs. The man in the cowboy clothes began to turn around.

 

“Just hold still and nobody’ll get hurt!” Lloyd shouted, and Poke immediately made him a liar by blowing a hole through the woman looking at the sauces. She flew out of her shoes.

 

“Holy gee, Poke!” Lloyd hollered. “You didn’t have to—”

 

“Pokerized her, ole buddy!” Poke yelled. “She’ll never watch Jerry Falwell again! Whoop! Whoop!”

 

The man in the cowboy clothes kept turning. He was holding his smokes in his left hand. The harsh light falling through the show window and the screen door pricked out bright stars on the dark lenses of his sunglasses. There was a .45 revolver tucked into his belt, and now he plucked it out unhurriedly as Lloyd and Poke were staring at the dead woman. He aimed, fired, and the left side of Poke’s face suddenly disappeared in a spray of blood and tissue and teeth.

 

“Shot! ” Poke screamed, dropping the .357 and flailing backward. His flailing hands raked potato chips and taco chips and Cheez Doodles onto the splintery wooden floor. “Shot me, Lloyd! Look out! Shot me! Shot me! ” He hit the screen door and it slammed open and Poke sat down hard on the porch outside, pulling one of the aged door hinges loose.

 

Lloyd, stunned, fired more in reflex than in self-defense. The Schmeisser’s roar filled the room. Cans flew. Bottles crashed, spilling catsup, pickles, olives. The glass front of the Pepsi cooler jingled inward. Bottles of Dr. Pepper and Jolt and Orange Crush exploded like clay pigeons. Foam ran everywhere. The man in the cowboy clothes, cool, calm, and collected, fired his piece again. Lloyd felt rather than heard the bullet as it droned by nearly close enough to part hair. He raked the Schmeisser across the room, from left to right.

 

The man in the SHELL cap dropped behind the counter with such suddenness that an observer might have thought a trapdoor had been sprung on him. A gumball machine disintegrated. Red, blue, and green chews rolled everywhere. The glass bottles on the counter exploded. One of them had contained pickled eggs; another, pickled pigs’ feet. Immediately the room was filled with the sharp odor of vinegar.

 

The Schmeisser put three bullet holes in the cowboy’s khaki shirt and most of his innards exited from the back to splatter all over Spuds MacKenzie. The cowboy went down, still clutching his .45 in one hand and his deck of Luckies in the other.

 

Lloyd, bullshit with fear, continued to fire. The machine pistol was growing hot in his hands. A box filled with returnable soda bottles tinkled and fell over. A calendar girl wearing hotpants took a bullet hole in one magical peach-colored thigh. A rack of paperbacks with no covers crashed over. Then the Schmeisser was empty, and the new silence was deafening. The smell of gunpowder was heavy and rank.

 

“Holy gee,” Lloyd said. He looked cautiously at the cowboy. It didn’t look like the cowboy was going to be a problem in either the near or distant future.

 

“Shot me! ” Poke brayed, and staggered back inside. He clawed the screen door out of his way with such force that the other hinge popped and the door slapped onto the porch. “Shot me, Lloyd, look out! ”

 

“I got him, Poke,” Lloyd soothed, but Poke seemed not to hear. He was a mess. His right eye blazed like a baleful sapphire. The left was gone. His left cheek had been vaporized; you could watch his jaw work on that side as he talked. Most of his teeth were gone over there, too. His shirt was soaked with blood. When you got right down to it, Poke was sort of a mess.

 

“Stupid fuck blew me up! ” Poke screamed. He bent over and got the .357 Mag. “I’ll teach you to shoot me, you dumb fuck.”

 

He advanced on the cowboy, a rural Dr. Sardonicus. He put one foot on the cowboy’s butt like a hunter posing for a picture with the bear which would soon be decorating the wall of his den, and prepared to empty the .357 into his head. Lloyd stood watching, gape-mouthed, the smoking machine pistol dangling from one hand, still trying to figure out how all of this had happened.

 

At that moment the man in the SHELL cap popped back up from behind the counter like Jack from his box, his face screwed up in an expression of desperate intent, a double-barreled shotgun clutched in both hands.

 

“Huh?” Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels. He went down, his face a worse mess than ever and not caring a bit.

 

Lloyd decided it was time to leave. Fuck the money. There was money everywhere. The time to throw off a little more pursuit had clearly come. He wheeled and exited the store in large shambling strides, his boots barely touching the boards.

 

He was halfway down the steps when an Arizona State Police cruiser wheeled into the yard. A trooper got out on the passenger side and pulled his pistol. “Hold it right there! What’s going on in there?”

 

“Three people dead!” Lloyd cried. “Hell of a mess! Guy that did it went out the back! I’m gettin the fuck out!”

 

He ran to the Connie, had actually slipped behind the wheel, and was just remembering that the keys were in Poke’s pocket when the trooper yelled: “Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!”

 

Lloyd halted. After examining the radical surgery on Poke’s face, it didn’t take a long time to decide he’d just as soon pass.

 

“Holy gee,” he said miserably as a second trooper laid a big horse pistol upside his head. The first one cuffed him.

 

“In the back of the cruiser, Sunny Jim.”

 

The man in the SHELL cap had come out onto the porch, still clutching his shotgun. “He shot Bill Markson!” he yelled in a high, queer voice. “T’other one shot Missus Storm! Hell of a note! I shot t’other one! He’s deader’n a shitbug! Like to shoot this one too, iff’n you boys’ll stand away!”

 

“Calm down, Pop,” one of the troopers said. “Fun’s over.”

 

“I’ll shoot him where he stands!” the old guy yelled. “I’ll lay him low!” Then he leaned forward like an English butler making a bow and threw up on his shoes.

 

“You boys get me away from that guy, would you?” Lloyd said. “I believe he’s crazy.”

 

“You got this comin outta the store, Sunny Jim,” the trooper who had thrown down on him in the first place said. The barrel of his pistol looped up and up, catching the sun, and then it crashed down on Lloyd Henreid’s head and he never woke up until that evening in the Apache County Jail’s infirmary.

 

 

Chapter 24

 

Lloyd Henreid, who had been tagged “the baby-faced, unrepentant killer” by the Phoenix papers, was led down the hallway of the Phoenix municipal jail’s maximum security wing by two guards. One of them had a runny nose, and they both looked sour. The wing’s other occupants were giving Lloyd their version of a tickertape parade. In Max, he was a celebrity.

 

“Heyyy, Henreid!”

 

“Go to, boy!”

 

“Tell the DA if he lets me walk I won’t letya hurt im!”

 

“Rock steady, Henreid!”

 

“Right on, brother! Rightonrightonrighton! ”

 

“Cheap mouthy bastards,” the guard with the runny nose muttered, and then sneezed.

 

Lloyd grinned happily. He was dazzled by his new fame. It sure wasn’t much like Brownsville had been. Even the food was better. When you got to be a heavy hitter, you got some respect. He imagined that Tom Cruise must feel something like this at a world premiere.

 

At the end of the hall they went through a doorway and a double-barred electric gate. He was frisked again, the guard with the cold breathing heavily through his mouth as if he had just run up a flight of stairs. Then they walked him through a metal detector for good measure, probably to make sure he didn’t have something crammed up his ass like that guy Papillon in the movies.

 

“Okay,” the one with the runny nose said, and another guard, this one in a booth made of bulletproof glass, waved them on. They walked down another hall, this one painted industrial green. It was very quiet in here; the only sounds were the guards’ clicking footfalls (Lloyd himself was wearing paper slippers) and the asthmatic wheeze from Lloyd’s right. At the far end of the hall, another guard was waiting in front of a closed door. The door had one small window, hardly more than a loophole, with wire embedded in the glass.

 

“Why do jails always smell so pissy?” Lloyd asked, just to make conversation. “I mean, even the places where no guys are locked up, it smells pissy. Do you guys maybe do your wee-wees in the corners?” He snickered at the thought, which was really pretty comical.

 

“Shut up, killer,” the guard with the cold said.

 

“You don’t look so good,” Lloyd said. “You ought to be home in bed.”

 

“Shut up,” the other said.

 

Lloyd shut up. That’s what happened when you tried to talk to these guys. It was his experience that the class of prison corrections officers had no class.

 

“Hi, scumbag,” the door-guard said.

 

“How ya doin, fuckface?” Lloyd responded smartly. There was nothing like a little friendly repartee to freshen you up. Two days in the joint and he could feel that old stir-stupor coming on him already.

 

“You’re gonna lose a tooth for that,” the door-guard said. “Exactly one, count it, one tooth.”

 

“Hey, now, listen, you can’t—”

 

“Yes I can. There are guys on the yard who would kill their dear old mothers for two cartons of Chesterfields, scumbucket. Would you care to try for two teeth?”

 

Lloyd was silent.

 

“That’s okay, then,” the door-guard said. “Just one tooth. You fellas can take him in.”

 

Smiling a little, the guard with the cold opened the door and the other led Lloyd inside, where his court-appointed lawyer was sitting at a metal table, looking at papers from his briefcase.

 

“Here’s your man, counselor.”

 

The lawyer looked up. He was hardly old enough to be shaving yet, Lloyd judged, but what the hell? Beggars couldn’t be choosers. They had him cold-cocked anyway, and Lloyd figured to get twenty years or so: When they had you nailed, you just had to close your eyes and grit your teeth.

 

“Thank you very—”

 

“That guy,” Lloyd said, pointing to the door-guard. “He called me a scumbag. And when I said something back to him, he said he was gonna have some guy knock out one of my teeth! How’s that for police brutality?”

 

The lawyer passed a hand over his face. “Any truth to that?” he asked the door-guard.

 

The door-guard rolled his eyes in a burlesque My God, can you believe it? gesture. “These guys, counselor,” he said, “they should write for TV. I said hi, he said hi, that was it.”

 

“That’s a fuckin lie!” Lloyd said dramatically.

 

“I keep my opinions to myself,” the guard said, and gave Lloyd a stony stare.

 

“I’m sure you do,” the lawyer said, “but I believe I’ll count Mr. Henreid’s teeth before I leave.”

 

A slight, angry discomfiture passed over the guard’s face, and he exchanged a glance with the two that had brought Lloyd in. Lloyd smiled. Maybe the kid was okay at that. The last two CAs he’d had were old hacks; one of them had come into court lugging a colostomy bag, could you believe that, a fucking colostomy bag? The old hacks didn’t give a shit for you. Plead and leave, that was their motto, let’s get rid of him so we can get back to swapping dirty stories with the judge. But maybe this guy could get him a straight ten, armed robbery. Maybe even time served. After all, the only one he’d actually pokerized was the wife of the guy in the white Connie, and maybe he could just roll that off on ole Poke. Poke wouldn’t mind. Poke was just as dead as old Dad’s hatband. Lloyd’s smile broadened a little. You had to look on the sunny side. That was the ticket. Life was too short to do anything else.

 

He became aware that the guard had left them alone and that his lawyer—his name was Andy Devins, Lloyd remembered—was looking at him in a strange way. It was the way you might look at a rattlesnake whose back has been broken but whose deadly bite is probably still unimpaired.

 

“You’re in deep shit, Sylvester!” Devins exclaimed suddenly.

 

Lloyd jumped. “What? What the hell do you mean, I’m in deep shit? By the way, I thought you handled ole fatty there real good. He looked mad enough to chew nails and spit out—”

 

“Listen to me, Sylvester, and listen very carefully.”

 

“My name’s not—”

 

“You don’t have the slightest idea how big a jam you’re in, Sylvester.” Devins’s gaze never faltered. His voice was soft and intense. His hair was blond and crewcut, hardly more than a fuzz. His scalp shone through pinkly. There was a plain gold wedding band on the third finger of his left hand and a fancy fraternity ring on the third finger of his right. He knocked them together and they made a funny little click that set Lloyd’s teeth on edge. “You’re going to trial in just nine days, Sylvester, because of a decision the Supreme Court handed down four years ago.”

 

“What was that?” Lloyd was more uneasy than ever.

 

“It was the case of Markham vs. South Carolina,” Devins said, “and it had to do with the conditions under which individual states may best administer swift justice in cases where the death penalty is requested.”

 

“Death penalty!” Lloyd cried, horror-struck. “You mean the lectric chair? Hey, man, I never killed anybody! Swear to God!”

 

“In the eyes of the law, that doesn’t matter,” Devins said. “If you were there, you did it.”

 

“What do you mean, it don’t matter?” Lloyd nearly screamed. “It does so matter! It better fuckin matter! I didn’t waste those people, Poke did! He was crazy! He was—”

 

“Will you shut up, Sylvester?” Devins inquired in that soft, intense voice, and Lloyd shut. In his sudden fear he had forgotten the cheers for him in Maximum, and even the unsettling possibility that he might lose a tooth. He suddenly had a vision of Tweety Bird running a number on Sylvester the Cat. Only in his mind, Tweety wasn’t bopping that dumb ole puddy-tat over the head with a mallet or sticking a mousetrap in front of his questing paw; what Lloyd saw was Sylvester strapped into Old Sparky while the parakeet perched on a stool by a big switch. He could even see the guard’s cap on Tweety’s little yellow head.

 

This was not a particularly amusing picture.

 

Perhaps Devins saw some of this in his face, because he looked moderately pleased for the first time. He folded his hands on the pile of papers he had taken from his briefcase. “There is no such thing as an accessory when it comes to first-degree murder committed during a felony crime,” he said. “The state has three witnesses who will testify that you and Andrew Freeman were together. That pretty well fries your skinny butt. Do you understand?”

 

“I—”

 

“Good. Now to get back to Markham vs. South Carolina. I am going to tell you, in words of one syllable, how the ruling in that case bears on your situation. But first, I ought to remind you of a fact you doubtless learned during one of your trips through the ninth grade: the Constitution of the United States specifically forbids cruel and unusual punishment.”

 

“Like the fucking lectric chair, damn right,” Lloyd said righteously.

 

Devins was shaking his head. “That’s where the law was unclear,” he said, “and up until four years ago, the courts had gone round and round and up and down, trying to make sense of it. Does ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ mean things like the electric chair and the gas chamber? Or does it mean the wait between sentencing and execution? The appeals, the delays, the stays, the months and years that certain prisoners—Edgar Smith, Caryl Chessman, and Ted Bundy are probably the most famous—were forced to spend on various Death Rows? The Supreme Court allowed executions to recommence in the late seventies, but Death Rows were still clogged, and that nagging question of cruel and unusual punishment remained. Okay—in Markham vs. South Carolina, you had a man sentenced to the electric chair for the rape-murder of three college co-eds. Premeditation was proved by a diary this fellow, Jon Markham, had kept. The jury sentenced him to death.”

 

“Bad shit,” Lloyd whispered.

 

Devins nodded, and gave Lloyd a slightly sour smile. “The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which reconfirmed that capital punishment was not cruel and unusual under certain circumstances. The court suggested that sooner was better… from a legal standpoint. Are you beginning to get it, Sylvester? Are you beginning to see?”

 

Lloyd didn’t.

 

“Do you know why you’re being tried in Arizona rather than New Mexico or Nevada?”

 

Lloyd shook his head.

 

“Because Arizona is one of four states that has a Capital Crimes Circuit Court which sits only in cases where the death penalty has been asked for and obtained.”

 

“I don’t follow you.”

 

“You’re going to trial in four days,” Devins said. “The state has such a strong case that they can afford to empanel the first twelve men and women that get called to the box. I’ll drag it out as long as I can, but we’ll have a jury on the first day. The state will present its case on the second day. I’ll try to take up three days, and I’ll filibuster on my opening and closing statements until the judge cuts me off, but three days is really tops. We’ll be lucky to get that. The jury will retire and find you guilty in about three minutes unless a goddamned miracle happens. Nine days from today you’ll be sentenced to death, and a week later, you’ll be dead as dogmeat. The people of Arizona will love it, and so will the Supreme Court. Because quicker makes everybody happier. I can stretch the week—maybe—but only a little.”

 

“Jesus Christ, but that’s not fair!” Lloyd cried.

 

“It’s a tough old world, Lloyd,” Devins said. “Especially for ‘mad dog killers,’ which is what the newspapers and TV commentators are calling you. You’re a real big man in the world of crime. You’ve got real drag. You even put the flu epidemic back East on page two.”

 

“I never pokerized nobody,” Lloyd said sulkily. “Poke, he did it all. He even made up that word.”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” Devins said. “That’s what I’m trying to pound through your thick skull, Sylvester. The judge is going to leave the Governor room for one stay, and only one. I’ll appeal, and under the new guidelines, my appeal has to be in the hands of the Capital Crimes Circuit Court within seven days or you exit stage left immediately. If they decide not to hear the appeal, I have another seven days to petition the Supreme Court of the United States. In your case, I’ll file my appeal brief as late as possible. The Capital Crimes Circuit Court will probably agree to hear us—the system’s still new, and they want as little criticism as possible. They’d probably hear Jack the Ripper’s appeal.”

 

“How long before they get to me?” Lloyd muttered.

 

“Oh, they’ll handle it in jig time,” Devins answered, and his smile became slightly wolfish. “You see, the Circuit Court is made up of five retired Arizona judges. They’ve got nothing to do but go fishing, play poker, drink bonded bourbon, and wait for some sad sack of shit like you to show up in their courtroom, which is really a bunch of computer modems hooked up to the State House, the Governor’s office, and each other. They’ve got telephones equipped with modems in their cars, cabins, even their boats, as well as in their houses. Their average age is seventy-two—”

 

Lloyd winced.

 

“—which means some of them are old enough to have actually ridden the Circuit Line out there in the willywags, if not as judges then as lawyers or law students. They all believe in the Code of the West—a quick trial and then up the rope. It was the way out here until 1950 or so. When it came to multiple murderers, it was the only way.”

 

“Jesus Christ Almighty, do you have to go on about it like that?”

 

“You need to know what we’re up against,” Devin said. “They just want to make sure you don’t suffer cruel and unusual punishment, Lloyd. You ought to thank them.”

 

“Thank them? I’d like to—”

 

“Pokerize them?” Devins asked quietly.

 

“No, course not,” Lloyd said unconvincingly.

 

“Our petition for a new trial will be turned down and all my exceptions will be quickly heaved out. If we’re lucky, the court will invite me to present witnesses. If they give me the opportunity, I’ll recall everybody that testified at the original trial, plus anyone else I can think of. At that point I’d call your junior high school chums as character witnesses, if I could find them.”

 

“I quit school in the sixth grade,” Lloyd said bleakly.

 

“After the Circuit Court turns us down, I’ll petition to be heard by the Supreme Court. I expect to be turned down on the same day.”

 

Devins stopped and lit a cigarette.

 

“Then what?” Lloyd asked.

 

“Then?” Devins asked, looking mildly surprised and exasperated at Lloyd’s continuing stupidity. “Why, then you go on to Death Row at state prison and just enjoy all that good food until it’s time to ride the lightning. It won’t be long.”

 

“They wouldn’t really do it,” Lloyd said. “You’re just trying to scare me.”

 

“Lloyd, the four states that have the Capital Crimes Circuit Court do it all the time. So far, forty men and women have been executed under the Markham guidelines. It costs the taxpayers a little extra for the added court, but not all that much, since they only work on a tiny percentage of first-degree murder cases. Also, the taxpayers really don’t mind opening their pocketbooks for capital punishment. They like it.”

 

Lloyd looked ready to throw up.

 

“Anyway,” Devins said, “a DA will only try a defendant under Markham guidelines if he looks completely guilty. It isn’t enough for the dog to have chicken feathers on his muzzle; you’ve got to catch him in the henhouse. Which is where they caught you.”

 

Lloyd, who had been basking in the cheers from the boys in Maximum Security not fifteen minutes ago, now found himself staring down a paltry two or three weeks and into a black hole.

 

“You scared, Sylvester?” Devins asked in an almost kindly way.

 

Lloyd had to lick his lips before he could answer. “Christ yes, I’m scared. From what you say, I’m a dead man.”

 

“I don’t want you dead,” Devins said, “just scared. If you go into that courtroom smirking and swaggering, they’ll strap you in the chair and throw the switch. You’ll be number forty-one under Markham. But if you listen to me, we might be able to squeak through. I don’t say we will; I say we might.”

 

“Go ahead.”

 

“The thing we have to count on is the jury,” Devins said. “Twelve ordinary shleps off the street. I’d like a jury filled with forty-two-year-old ladies who can still recite Winnie the Pooh by heart and have funerals for their pet birds in the back yard, that’s what I’d like. Every jury is made very aware of Markham ’s consequences when they’re empaneled. They’re not bringing in a verdict of death that may or may not be implemented in six months or six years, long after they’ve forgotten it; the guy they’re condemning in June is going to be pushing up daisies before the All-Star break.”

 

“You’ve got a hell of a way of putting things.”

 

Ignoring him, Devins went on: “In some cases, just that knowledge has caused juries to bring in verdicts of not guilty. It’s one adverse result of Markham. In some cases, juries have let blatant murderers go just because they didn’t want blood that fresh on their hands.” He picked up a sheet of paper. “Although forty people have been executed under Markham, the death penalty has been asked for under Markham a total of seventy times. Of the thirty not executed, twenty-six were found ‘not guilty’ by the empaneled juries. Only four convictions were overturned by the Capital Crimes Circuit Courts, one in South Carolina, two in Florida, and one in Alabama.”

 

“Never in Arizona?”

 

“Never. I told you. The Code of the West. Those five old men want your ass nailed to a board. If we don’t get you off in front of a jury, you’re through. I can offer you ninety-to-one on it.”

 

“How many people have been found not guilty by regular court juries under that law in Arizona?”

 

“Two out of fourteen.”

 

“Those are pretty crappy odds, too.”

 

Devins smiled his wolfish smile. “I should point out,” he said, “that one of those two was defended by yours truly. He was guilty as sin, Lloyd, just like you are. Judge Pechert raved at those ten women and two men for twenty minutes. I thought he was going to have apoplexy.”

 

“If I was found not guilty, they couldn’t try me again, could they?”

 

“Absolutely not.”

 

“So it’s one roll, double or nothing.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Boy,” Lloyd said, and wiped his forehead.

 

“As long as you understand the situation,” Devins said, “and where we have to make our stand, we can get down to brass tacks.”

 

“I understand it. I don’t like it, though.”

 

“You’d be nuts if you did.” Devins folded his hands and leaned over them. “Now. You’ve told me and you’ve told the police that you, uh…” He took a stapled sheaf of papers out of the stack by his briefcase and riffled through them. “Ah. Here we are. ‘I never killed nobody. Poke did all the killing. Killing was his idea, not mine. Poke was crazy as a bedbug and I guess it is a blessing to the world that he has passed on.’”

 

“Yeah, that’s right, so what?” Lloyd said defensively.

 

“Just this,” Devins said cozily. “That implies you were scared of Poke Freeman. Were you scared of him?”

 

“Well, I wasn’t exactly—”

 

“You were afraid for your life, in fact.”

 

“I don’t think it was—”

 

“Terrified. Believe it, Sylvester. You were shitting nickels.”

 

Lloyd frowned at his lawyer. It was the frown of a lad who wants to be a good student but is having a serious problem grasping the lesson.

 

“Don’t let me lead you, Lloyd,” Devins said. “I don’t want to do that. You might think I was suggesting that Poke was stoned almost all the time—”

 

“He was! We both was!”

 

“No. You weren’t, but he was. And he got crazy when he got stoned—”

 

“Boy, you’re not shitting.” In the halls of Lloyd’s memory, the ghost of Poke Freeman cried Whoop! Whoop! merrily and shot the woman in the Burrack general store.

 

“And he held a gun on you at several points in time—”

 

“No, he never—”

 

“Yes he did. You just forgot for a while. In fact, he once threatened to kill you if you didn’t back his play.”

 

“Well, I had a gun—”

 

“I believe,” Devins said, eyeing him closely, “that if you search your memory, you’ll remember Poke telling you that your gun was loaded with blanks. Do you remember that?”

 

“Now that you mention it—”

 

“And nobody was more surprised than you when it actually started firing real bullets, right?”

 

“Sure,” Lloyd said. He nodded vigorously. “I bout damn near had a hemorrhage.”

 

“And you were about to turn that gun on Poke Freeman when he was cut down, saving you the trouble.”

 

Lloyd regarded his lawyer with dawning hope in his eyes.

 

“Mr. Devins,” he said with great sincerity, “that’s just the way the shit went down.”

 

He was in the exercise yard later that morning, watching a softball game and mulling over everything Devins had told him, when a large inmate named Mathers came over and yanked him up by the collar. Mathers’s head was shaved bald, à la Telly Savalas, and it gleamed benignly in the hot desert air.

 

“Now wait a minute,” Lloyd said. “My lawyer counted every one of my teeth. Seventeen. So if you—”

 

“Yeah, that’s what Shockley said,” Mathers said. “So, he told me to—”

 

Mathers’s knee came up squarely in Lloyd’s crotch, and blinding pain exploded there, so excruciating that he could not even scream. He collapsed in a hunching, writhing pile, clutching his testicles, which felt crushed. The world was a reddish fog of agony.

 

After a while, who knew how long, he was able to look up. Mathers was still looking at him, and his bald head was still gleaming. The guards were pointedly looking elsewhere. Lloyd moaned and writhed, tears squirting out of his eyes, a red-hot ball of lead in his belly.

 

“Nothing personal,” Mathers said sincerely. “Just business, you understand. Myself, I hope you make out. That Markham law’s a bitch.”

 

He strode away and Lloyd saw the door-guard standing atop the ramp in the truck-loading bay on the other side of the exercise yard. His thumbs were hooked in his Sam Browne belt and he was grinning at Lloyd. When he saw he had Lloyd’s complete, undivided attention, the door-guard shot him the bird with the middle fingers of both hands. Mathers strolled over to the wall, and the door-guard threw him a pack of Tareytons. Mathers put them in his breast pocket, sketched a salute, and walked away. Lloyd lay on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chest, hands clutching his cramping belly, and Devins’s words echoed in his brain: It’s a tough old world, Lloyd, it’s a tough old world.

 

Right.

 

Chapter 32

 

Someone had left the door open between Maximum Security and the cellblock beyond it; the steel-walled length of corridor acted as a natural amplifier, blowing up the steady, monotonous hollering that had been going on all morning to monster size, making it echo and re-echo until Lloyd Henreid thought that, between the cries and the very natural fear that he felt, he would go utterly and completely bugshit.

 

“Mother,” the hoarse, echoing cry came. “Mootherr! ”

 

Lloyd was sitting crosslegged on the floor of his cell. Both of his hands were slimed with blood; he looked like a man who has drawn on a pair of red gloves. The light blue cotton shirt of his prison uniform was smeared with blood because he kept wiping his hands dry on it in order to get a better purchase. It was ten o’clock in the morning, June 29. Around seven this morning he had noticed that the front right leg of his bunk was loose, and since then he had been trying to unthread the bolts that held it to the floor and to the underside of the bedframe. He was trying to do this with only his fingers for tools, and he had actually gotten five of the six bolts. As a result his fingers now looked like a spongy mess of raw hamburger. The sixth bolt was the one that had turned out to be the bitch-kitty, but he was beginning to think he might actually get it. Beyond that, he hadn’t allowed himself to think. The only way to keep back brute panic was not to think.

 

“Mootherr —”

 

He leaped to his feet, drops of blood from his wounded, throbbing fingers splattering on the floor, and shoved his face out into the corridor as far as he could, eyes bulging furiously, hands gripping the bars.

 

“Shut up, cock-knocker! ” he screamed. “Shut up, ya drivin me fuckin batshit! ”

 

There was a long pause. Lloyd savored the silence as he had once savored a piping hot Quarter Pounder with Cheese from McD’s. Silence is golden, he had always thought that was a stupid saying, but it sure had its points.

 

“MOOOOTHERRRR —” The voice came drifting up at the steel throat of the holding cells again, as mournful as a foghorn.

 

“Jesus,” Lloyd muttered. “Holy Jesus. SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP, YA FUCKIN DIMWIT! ”

 

“MOOOOOOOTHERRRRRRRRRR —”

 

Lloyd turned back to the leg of his bunk and attacked it savagely, wishing again that there was something in the cell to pry with, trying to ignore the throbbing in his fingers and the panic in his mind. He tried to remember exactly when he had seen his lawyer last—things like that grew hazy very soon in Lloyd’s mind, which retained a chronology of past events about as well as a sieve retains water. Three days ago. Yes. The day after that prick Mathers had socked him in the balls. Two guards had taken him down to the conference room again and Shockley was still on the door and Shockley had greeted him: Why, here’s the wise-ass pusbag, what’s the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say? And then Shockley had opened his mouth and sneezed right into Lloyd’s face, spraying him with thick spit. There’s some cold germs for you, pusbag, everybody else has got one from the warden on down, and I believe in share the wealth. In America even scummy douchebags like you should be able to catch a cold. Then they had taken him in, and Devins had looked like a man who is trying to conceal some pretty good news lest it should turn out to be bad news, after all. The judge who was supposed to hear Lloyd’s case was flat on his back with the flu. Two other judges were also ill, either with the flu that was going around or with something else, so the remaining benchwarmers were swamped. Maybe they could get a postponement. Keep your fingers crossed, the lawyer had said. When would we know? Lloyd had asked. Probably not until the last minute, Devins had replied. I’ll let you know, don’t worry. But Lloyd hadn’t seen him since then and now, thinking, back on it, he remembered that the lawyer had had a runny nose himself and—

 

“OwwwoooJesus! ”

 

He slipped the fingers of his right hand into his mouth and tasted blood. But that frigging bolt had given a little bit, and that meant he was going to get it for sure. Even the mother-shouter down there at the end of the hall could no longer bother him… at least not so badly. He was going to get it. After that he would just have to wait and see what happened. He sat with his fingers in his mouth, giving them a rest. When this was done, he’d rip his shirt into strips and bandage them.

 

“Mother? ”

 

“I know what you can do with your mother,” Lloyd muttered.

 

That night, after he had talked to Devins for the last time, they had begun taking sick prisoners out, carrying them out, not to put too fine a point on it, because they weren’t taking anyone that wasn’t already far gone. The man in the cell on Lloyd’s right, Trask, had pointed out that most of the guards sounded pretty snotty themselves. Maybe we can get something outta this, Trask said. What? Lloyd had asked. I dunno, Trask said. He was a skinny man with a long bloodhound face who was in Maximum Security while awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Postponements, he said. I dunno.

 

Trask had six joints under the thin mattress of his bunk, and he gave four of them to one of the screws who still seemed okay to tell him what was going on outside. The guard said people were leaving Phoenix, bound for anyplace. There was a lot of sickness, and people were croaking faster than a horse could trot. The government said a vaccine was going to be available soon, but most people seemed to think that was crap. A lot of the radio stations from California were broadcasting really terrible things about martial law, army blockades, home-boys with automatic weapons on the rampage, and rumors of people dying by the tens of thousands. The guard said he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the longhaired comsymp pervos had done it by putting something into the water.

 

The guard said he was feeling fine himself, but he was going to get the Christ out just as soon as his shift was over. He had heard the army was going to roadblock US 17 and I-10 and US 80 by tomorrow morning, and he was going to load up his wife and kid and all the food he could get his hands on and stay up in the mountains until it all blew over. He had a cabin up there, the guard said, and if anyone tried to get within thirty yards of it, he would put a bullet in his head.

 

The next morning Trask had a runny nose and said he felt feverish. He had been nearly gibbering with panic, Lloyd remembered as he sucked his fingers. Trask had yelled at every guard who passed to get him the fuck out before he got really sick or something. The guards never even looked at him, or at any of the other prisoners, who were now as restless as underfed lions in the zoo. That was when Lloyd started to feel scared. Usually there were as many as twenty different screws on the floor at any given time. So how come he had seen only four or five different faces on the other side of the bars?

 

That day, the twenty-seventh, Lloyd had begun eating only half of the meals that were thrust through the bars at him, and saving the other half—precious little—under his bunk mattress.

 

Yesterday Trask had gone into sudden convulsions. His face had turned as black as the ace of spades and he had died. Lloyd had looked longingly at Trask’s half-eaten lunch, but he had no way to reach it. Yesterday afternoon there had still been a few guards on the floor, but they weren’t carrying anyone down to the infirmary anymore, no matter how sick. Maybe they were dying down in the infirmary, too, and the warden decided to stop wasting the effort. No one came to remove Trask’s body.

 

Lloyd napped late yesterday afternoon. When he woke, the Maximum Security corridors were empty. No supper had been served. Now the place really did sound like the lion house at the zoo. Lloyd wasn’t imaginative enough to wonder how much more savage it would have sounded if Maximum Security had been filled to its capacity. He had no idea how many were still alive and lively enough to yell for their supper, but the echoes made it sound like more. All Lloyd knew for sure was that Trask was gathering flies on his right, and the cell on his left was empty. The former occupant, a young jive-talking black guy who had tried to mug an old lady and had killed her instead, had been taken to the infirmary days back. Across the way he could see two empty cells and the dangling feet of a man who was in for killing his wife and his brother-in-law during a penny Pokeno game. The Pokeno Killer, as he had been called, had apparently opted out with his belt, or if they had taken that, his own pair of pants.

 

Later that night, after the lights had come on automatically, Lloyd had eaten some of the beans he had saved from two days ago. They tasted horrible but he ate them anyway. He washed them down with water from the toilet bowl and then crawled up on his bunk and clasped his knees against his chest, cursing Poke for getting him into such a mess. It was all Poke’s fault. On his own, Lloyd never would have been ambitious to get into more than small-time trouble.

 

Little by little, the roaring for food had quieted down, and Lloyd suspected he wasn’t the only one who had been squirreling away some insurance. But he didn’t have much. If he had really believed this was going to happen, he would have put away more. There was something in the back of his mind that he didn’t want to see. It was as if there was a set of flapping drapes in the back of his mind, with something behind them. You could only see that thing’s bony, skeletal feet below the hem of the drapes. That’s all you wanted to see. Because the feet belonged to a nodding, emaciated corpse, and his name was STARVATION.

 

“Oh no,” Lloyd said. “Someone’s gonna come. Sure they are. Just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket.”

 

But he kept remembering the rabbit. He couldn’t help it. He had won the rabbit and a cage to keep him in at a school raffle. His daddy didn’t want him to keep it, but Lloyd had somehow persuaded him that he would take care of it and feed it out of his own allowance. He loved that rabbit, and he did take care of it. At first. The trouble was, things slipped his mind after a while. It had always been that way. And one day while he was swinging idly in the tire that hung from the sickly maple behind their scraggy little house in Marathon, Pennsylvania, he had suddenly sat bolt upright, thinking of that rabbit. He hadn’t thought of his rabbit in… well, in better than two weeks. It had just completely slipped his mind.

 

He ran to the little shed tacked onto the barn, and it had been summer just like it was now, and when he stepped into that shed, the bland smell of the rabbit had struck him in the face like a big old roundhouse slap. The fur he had liked so much to stroke was matted and dirty. White maggots crawled busily in the sockets that had once held his rabbit’s pretty pink eyes. The rabbit’s paws were ragged and bloody. He tried to tell himself that the paws were bloody because it had tried to scratch its way out of the cage, and that was undoubtedly how it had happened, but some sick, dark part of his mind spoke up in a whisper and said that maybe the rabbit, in the final extremity of its hunger, had tried to eat itself.

 

Lloyd had taken the rabbit away, dug a deep hole, and buried it, still in its cage. His father had never asked him about the rabbit, might even have forgotten that his boy had a rabbit—Lloyd was not terribly bright, but he was a mental giant when stacked up against his daddy—but Lloyd had never forgotten. Always plagued by vivid dreams, the death of the rabbit had occasioned a series of terrible nightmares. And now the vision of the rabbit returned as he sat on his bunk with his knees drawn up to his chest, telling himself that someone would come, someone would surely come and let him go free. He didn’t have this Captain Trips flu; he was just hungry. Like his rabbit had been hungry. Just like that.

 

Sometime after midnight he had fallen asleep, and this morning he had begun to work on the leg of his bunk. And now, looking at his bloody fingers, he thought with fresh horror about the paws of that long-ago rabbit, to whom he had meant no harm.

 

By one o’clock on the afternoon of June 29, he had the cotleg free. At the end the bolt had given with stupid ease and the leg had clanged to the floor of his cell and he had just looked at it, wondering what in God’s name he had wanted it for in the first place. It was about three feet long.

 

He took it to the front of the cell and began to hammer furiously against the blued-steel bars. “Hey!” he yelled, as the clanging bar gave off its deep, gonglike notes. “Hey, I want out! I want to get the fuck out of here, understand? Hey, goddammit, hey! ”

 

He stopped and listened as the echoes faded. For a moment there was total silence and then from the holding cellblock came the rapturous, hoarse answer: “Mother! Down here, Mother! I’m down here!”

 

“Jeeesus! ” Lloyd cried, and threw the cotleg into the corner. He had struggled for hours, practically destroyed his fingers, just so he could wake that asshole up.

 

He sat on his bunk, lifted the mattress, and took out a piece of rough bread. He debated adding a handful of dates, told himself he should save them, and snatched them up anyway. He ate them one by one, grimacing, saving the bread for last to take that slimy, fruity taste out of his mouth.

 

When he was done with this miserable excuse for a meal, he walked aimlessly to the right side of his cell. He looked down and stifled a cry of revulsion. Trask was sprawled half on his cot and half off it, and his pants legs had pulled up a little. His ankles were bare above the prison slippers they gave you to wear. A large, sleek rat was lunching up on Trask’s leg. Its repulsive pink tail was neatly coiled around its gray body.

 

Lloyd walked to the other corner of his own cell and picked up the cotleg. He went back and stood for a moment, wondering if the rat would see him and decide to go off where the company wasn’t quite so lively. But the rat’s back was to him, and as far as Lloyd could tell, the rat didn’t even know he was there. Lloyd measured the distance with his eye and decided the cotleg would reach admirably.

 

“Huh!” Lloyd grunted, and swung the leg. It squashed the rat against Trask’s leg, and Trask fell off his bunk with a stiff thump. The rat lay on its side, dazed, aspirating weakly. There were beads of blood in its whiskers. Its rear legs were moving, as if its ratty little brain was telling it to run somewhere but along the spinal cord the signals were getting all scrambled up. Lloyd hit it again and killed it.

 

“There you are, you cheap fuck,” Lloyd said. He put the cotleg down and wandered back to his bunk. He was hot and scared and felt like crying. He looked back over his shoulder and cried: “How do you like rat hell, you scuzzy little cocksucker?”

 

“Mother!” the voice cried happily in answer. “Moootherrr! ”

 

“Shut up! ” Lloyd screamed. “I ain’t your mother! Your mother’s in charge of blowjobs at a whorehouse in Asshole, Indiana! ”

 

“Mother?” the voice said, now full of weak doubt. Then it fell silent.

 

Lloyd began to weep. As he cried he rubbed his eyes with his fists like a small boy. He wanted a steak sandwich, he wanted to talk to his lawyer, he wanted to get out of here.

 

At last he lay down on his cot, put one arm over his eyes, and masturbated. It was as good a way of getting to sleep as any.

 

When he woke up again it was 5 P.M. and Maximum Security was dead quiet. Blearily, Lloyd got off his cot, which now leaned drunkenly toward the spot where one of its supports had been taken away. He got the cotleg, steeled himself for the cries of “Mother! ” and began hammering on the bars like a farm cook calling the hired hands in for a big country supper. Supper. Now there was a word, had there ever been a finer? Ham steaks and potatoes with redeye gravy and fresh new peas and milk with Hershey’s chocolate syrup to dump in it. And a great big old dish of strawberry ice cream for dessert. No, there had never been a word to match supper.

 

“Hey, ain’t nobody there?” Lloyd cried, his voice breaking.

 

No answer. Not even a cry of “Mother! ” At this point, he might have welcomed it. Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

 

Lloyd let the cotleg drop with a crash. He stumbled back to his bunk, turned up the mattress, and made inventory. Two more hunks of bread, two more handfuls of dates, a half-gnawed pork chop, one piece of bologna. He pulled the slice of bologna in two and ate the big half, but that only whetted his appetite, brought it raging up.

 

“No more,” he whispered, then gobbled the rest of the pork off the chopbone and called himself names and wept some more. He was going to die in here, just as his rabbit had died in its cage, just as Trask had died in his.

 

Trask.

 

He looked into Trask’s cell for a long, thoughtful time, watching the flies circle and land and take off. There was a regular L.A. International Airport for flies right on ole Trask’s face. At long last, Lloyd got the cotleg, went to the bars, and reached through with it. By standing on tiptoe he could get just enough length to catch the rat’s body and drag it toward his cell.

 

When it was close enough, Lloyd got on his knees and pulled the rat through to his side. He picked it up by the tail and held the dangling body before his eyes for a long time. Then he put it under his mattress where the flies could not get at it, segregating the limp body from what remained of his food-stash. He looked fixedly at the rat for a long time before letting the mattress fall back, mercifully hiding it from sight.

 

“Just in case,” Lloyd Henreid whispered to the silence. “Just in case, is all.”

 

Then he climbed up on the other end of the bunk, drew his knees up to his chin, and sat still.

Chapter 39

 

Lloyd Henreid was down on his knees. He was humming and grinning. Every now and then he would forget what he had been humming and the grin would fade and he would sob a little bit, and then he would forget he was crying and go on humming. The song he was humming was “Camptown Races.” Every now and then, instead of humming or sobbing, he would whisper “Doo-dah, doo-dah” under his breath. The holding cellblock was utterly quiet except for the humming, the sobbing, the occasional doo-dah, and the soft scrape of the cotleg as Lloyd fumbled with it. He was trying to turn Trask’s body around so he could get at the leg. Please, waiter, bring me some more of that cole slaw and another leg.

 

Lloyd looked like a man who had embarked upon a radical crash diet. His prison coverall hung on his body like a limp sail. The last meal served in the holding cellblock had been lunch eight days ago. Lloyd’s skin was stretched tightly across his face, limning every curve and angle of the skull beneath. His eyes were bright and glittering. His lips had drawn back from his teeth. He had an oddly piebald look, because his hair had begun to fall out in clumps. He looked crazy.

 

“Doo-dah, doo-dah,” Lloyd whispered as he fished with his cotleg. Once upon a time he hadn’t known why he had bothered hurting his fingers to unscrew the damn thing. Once upon a time he had thought he had known what real hunger was. That hunger had been nothing but a slight edge to the appetite when compared with this.

 

“Ride around all night… ride around all day… doo-dah…”

 

The cotleg snagged the calf of Trask’s pantsleg and then pulled free. Lloyd put his head down and sobbed like a child. Behind him, tossed indifferently in one corner, was the skeleton of the rat he had killed in Trask’s cell on June 29, five days ago. The rat’s long pink tail was still attached to the skeleton. Lloyd had tried repeatedly to eat the tail but it was too tough. Almost all the water in the toilet bowl was gone despite his efforts to conserve it. The cell was filled with the reek of urine; he had been peeing out into the corridor so as not to contaminate his water supply. He had not—and this was understandable enough, considering the radically reduced conditions of his diet—had to move his bowels.

 

He had eaten the food he had squirreled away too fast. He knew that now. He had thought someone would come. He hadn’t been able to believe—

 

He didn’t want to eat Trask. The thought of eating Trask was horrible. Just last night he had managed to slap one of his slippers over a cockroach and had eaten it alive; he had felt it scuttering madly around inside his mouth just before his teeth had crunched it in two. Actually, it hadn’t been half bad, much tastier than the rat. No, he didn’t want to eat Trask. He didn’t want to be a cannibal. It was like the rat. He would get Trask over within reaching distance… but just in case. Just in case. He had heard a man could go a long time without food as long as he had water.

 

(not much water but I won’t think about that now not just now no not just now)

 

He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to starve. He was too full of hate.

 

The hate had built up at a fairly leisurely pace over the last three days, growing with his hunger. He supposed that, if his long-dead pet rabbit had been capable of thought, it would have hated him in the same way (he slept a great deal tow, and his sleep was always troubled with dreams of his rabbit, its body swollen, its fur matted, the maggots squirming in its eyes, and worst of all, those bloody paws: when he awoke he would look at his own fingers in dread fascination). Lloyd’s hate had coalesced around a simple imagistic concept, and this concept was THE KEY.

 

He was locked in. Once upon a time it had seemed right that he should be. He was one of the bad guys. Not a really bad guy; Poke had been the really bad guy. Small shit was the worst he would have done without Poke. Still, he shared a certain amount of the blame. There had been Gorgeous George in Vegas, and the three people in the white Continental—he had been in on that, and he supposed he had owned some of that heat. He supposed he deserved to take a fall, do a little time. It wasn’t something you volunteered for, but when they had you cold they gave you the bullet and you ate it. Like he had told the lawyer, he thought he deserved about twenty for his part in the “tri-state killspree.” Not in the electric chair, Christ no. The thought of Lloyd Henreid riding the lightning was just… it was crazy.

 

But they had THE KEY, that was the thing. They could lock you up and do what they wanted with you.

 

In the last three days, Lloyd had vaguely begun to grasp the symbolic, talismanic power of THE KEY. THE KEY was your reward for playing by the rules. If you didn’t, they could lock you up. It was no different than the Go to Jail card in Monopoly. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. And with THE KEY went certain prerogatives. They could take away ten years of your life, or twenty, or forty. They could hire people like Mathers to beat on you. They could even take away your life in the electric chair.

 

But having THE KEY didn’t give them the right to go away and leave you locked up to starve. It didn’t give them the right to force you into eating a dead rat and to try to eat the dry ticking of your mattress. It didn’t give them the right to leave you in a spot where you might just have to eat the man in the next cell to stay alive (if you can get ahold of him, that is—doo-dah, doo-dah).

 

There were certain things you just couldn’t do to people. Having THE KEY only took you so far and no farther. They had left him here to die a horrible death when they could have let him out. He wasn’t a mad dog killer who was going to waste the first person he saw, in spite of what the papers had said. Small shit was the worst he had ever gotten into before meeting Poke.

 

So he hated, and the hate commanded him to live… or at least to try. For a while it seemed to him that the hate and the determination to go on living were useless things, because all of those who had THE KEY had succumbed to the flu. They were beyond the reach of his vengeance. Then, little by little, as he grew hungrier, he realized that the flu wouldn’t kill them. It would kill the losers like him; it would kill Mathers but not that scumbag screw who had hired Mathers because the screw had THE KEY. It wasn’t going to kill the governor or the warden—the guard who said the warden was sick had obviously been a fucking liar. It wasn’t going to kill the parole officers, the county sheriffs, or the FBI agents. The flu would not touch those who had THE KEY. It wouldn’t dare. But Lloyd would touch them. If he lived long enough to get out of here, he would touch them plenty.

 

The cotleg snagged in Trask’s cuff again.

 

“Come on,” Lloyd whispered. “Come on. Come on over here… camptown ladies sing dis song… all doo-dah day.”

 

Trask’s body slid slowly, stiffly, along the floor of his cell. No fisherman ever played a bonita more carefully or with greater wile than Lloyd played Trask. Once Trask’s trousers ripped and Lloyd had to hook on in a new place. But at last his foot was close enough so that Lloyd could reach through the bars and grab it… if he wanted to.

 

“Nothing personal,” he whispered to Trask. He touched Trask’s leg. He caressed it. “Nothing personal, I ain’t going to eat you, old buddy. Not less I have to.”

 

He was not even aware that he was salivating.

 

---

Lloyd heard someone in the ashy afterglow of dusk, and at first the sound was so far away and so strange—the clash of metal on metal—that he thought he must be dreaming it. The waking and sleeping states had become very similar to him now; he crossed back and forth across that boundary almost without knowing it.

 

But then the voice came and he snapped upright on his cot, his eyes flaring wide, huge and lambent in his starved face. The voice came floating down the corridors from God knew how far up in the Administration Wing and then down the stairwell to the hallways which connected the visiting areas to the central cellblock, where Lloyd was. It bobbed serenely through the twice-barred doors and finally reached Lloyd’s ears:

 

“Hooooo-hoooo! Anybody home? ”

 

And strangely, Lloyd’s first thought was: Don’t answer. Maybe he’ll go away.

 

“Anybody home? Going once, going twice?… Okay, I’m on my way, just about to shake the dust of Phoenix from my boots —”

 

At that, Lloyd’s paralysis broke. He catapulted off the cot, snatched up the cotleg, and began to beat it frantically on the bars; the vibrations raced up the metal and shivered in the bones of his clenched fist.

 

“No! ” he screamed. “No! Don’t go! Please don’t go! ”

 

The voice, closer now, coming from the stairway between the Administration and this floor: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so… and oh, someone sounds so… hungry.” This was followed by a lazy chuckle.

 

Lloyd dropped the cotleg on the floor and wrapped both hands around the bars of the cell door. Now he could hear the footfalls somewhere up in the shadows, clocking steadily down the hall that led to the holding cellblock. Lloyd wanted to burst into tears of relief… after all, he was saved… yet it was not joy but fear he felt in his heart, a growing dread that made him wish he had stayed silent. Stayed silent? My God! What could be worse than starvation?

 

Starvation made him think of Trask. Trask lay sprawled on his back in the ashy afterglow of dusk, one leg stretched stiffly into Lloyd’s cell, and an essential subtraction had occurred in the region of that leg’s calf. The fleshy part of that leg’s calf. There were teeth-marks there. Lloyd knew whose teeth had made those marks, but he had only the vaguest memory of lunching on filet of Trask. All the same, powerful feelings of revulsion, guilt, and horror filled him. He rushed across to the bars and pushed Trask’s leg back into his own cell. Then, looking over his shoulder to make sure the owner of the voice was not yet in sight, he reached through, and with the dividing bars pressed against his face, he pulled Trask’s pantsleg down, hiding what he had done.

 

Of course there was no great hurry, because the barred gates at the head of the cellblock were shut, and with the power off, the pushbutton wouldn’t work. His rescuer would have to go back and find THE KEY. He would have to—

 

Lloyd grunted as the electric motor which operated the barred gates, whined into life. The silence of the cellblock magnified the sound, which ceased with the familiar click-slam! of the gates locking open.

 

Then the steps were clocking steadily up the cellblock walkway.

 

Lloyd had gone to his cell door again after neatening up Trask; now he involuntarily fell back two steps. He dropped his gaze to the floor outside and what he saw first was a pair of dusty cowboy boots with pointed toes and rundown heels and his first thought was that Poke had had a pair like that.

 

The boots stopped in front of his cell.

 

His gaze rose slowly, taking in the faded jeans snugged down over the boots, the leather belt with the brass buckle (various astrological signs inside a pair of concentric circles), the jeans jacket with a button pinned to each of the breast pockets—a smiley-smile face on one, a dead pig and the words HOW’S YOUR PORK on the other.

 

At the same instant Lloyd’s eyes reluctantly reached Randall Flagg’s darkly flushed face, Flagg screamed “Boo! ” The single sound floated down the dead cellblock and then rushed back. Lloyd shrieked, stumbled over his own feet, fell down, and began to cry.

 

“That’s all right,” Flagg soothed. “Hey, man, that’s all right. Everything’s purely all right.”

 

Lloyd sobbed: “Can you let me out? Please let me out. I don’t want to be like my rabbit, I don’t want to end up like that, it’s not fair, if it wasn’t for Poke I never would have got into anything but small shit, please let me out, mister, I’ll do anything.”

 

“You poor guy. You look like an advertisement for a summer vacation at Dachau.”

 

Despite the sympathy in Flagg’s voice, Lloyd could not bring himself to raise his eyes beyond the knees of the newcomer’s jeans. If he looked into that face again, it would kill him. It was the face of a devil.

 

“Please,” Lloyd mumbled. “Please let me out. I’m starving.”

 

“How long you been shitcanned, my friend?”

 

“I don’t know,” Lloyd said, wiping his eyes with thin fingers. “A long time.”

 

“How come you’re not dead already?”

 

“I knew what was coming,” Lloyd told the bluejeaned legs as he drew the last tattered shreds of his cunning around him. “I saved up my food. That’s what.”

 

“Didn’t happen to have a chomp on this fine fellow in the next cell, by any chance?”

 

“What?” Lloyd croaked. “What? No! Christ’s sake! What do you think I am? Mister, mister, please—”

 

“His left leg there looks a little thinner than his right one. That’s the only reason I asked, my good friend.”

 

“I don’t know nothing about that,” Lloyd whispered. He was trembling all over.

 

“How about Br’er Rat? How did he taste?”

 

Lloyd put his hands over his face and said nothing.

 

“What’s your name?”

 

Lloyd tried to say, but all that came out was a moan.

 

“What’s your name, soldier?”

 

“Lloyd Henreid.” He tried to think what to say next, but his mind was a chaotic jumble: He had been afraid when his lawyer told him he might go to the electric chair, but not this afraid. He had never been this afraid in his entire life. “It was all Poke’s idea!” he screamed. “Poke should be here, not me!”

 

“Look at me, Lloyd.”

 

“No,” Lloyd whispered. His eyes rolled wildly.

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because…”

 

“Go on.”

 

“Because I don’t think you’re real,” Lloyd whispered. “And if you are real… mister, if you’re real, you’re the devil.”

 

“Look at me, Lloyd.”

 

Helplessly, Lloyd turned his eyes up to that dark, grinning face that hung behind an intersection of bars. The right hand held something up beside the right eye. Looking at it made Lloyd feel cold and hot all over. It looked like a black stone, so dark it seemed almost resinous and pitchy. There was a red flaw in the center of it, and to Lloyd it looked like a terrible eye, bloody and half-open, peering at him. Then Flagg turned it slightly between his fingers, and the red flaw in the dark stone looked like… a key. Flagg turned it back and forth between his fingers. Now it was the eye, now it was the key.

 

The eye, the key.

 

He sang: “She brought me coffee… she brought me tea… she brought me… damn near everything… but the workhouse key. Right, Lloyd?”

 

“Sure,” Lloyd said huskily. His eyes never left the small dark stone. Flagg began to walk it from one finger to the next like a magician doing a trick.

 

“Now you’re a man who must appreciate the value of a good key,” the man said. The dark stone disappeared in his clenched fist and suddenly reappeared in his other hand, where it began to finger-walk again. “I’m sure you are. Because what a key is for is opening doors. Is there anything more important in life than opening doors, Lloyd?”

 

“Mister, I’m awfully hungry…”

 

“Sure you are,” the man said. An expression of concern spread over his face, an expression so magnified that it became grotesque. “Jesus Christ, a rat isn’t anything to eat! Why, do you know what I had for lunch? I had a nice rare roast beef sandwich on Vienna bread with a few onions and a lot of Gulden’s Spicy Brown. Sound good?”

 

Lloyd nodded his head, tears oozing slowly out of his overbright eyes.

 

“Had some homefries and chocolate milk to go with it, and then for dessert… holy crow, I’m torturing you, ain’t I? Someone ought to take a hosswhip to me, that’s what they ought to do. I’m sorry. I’ll let you right out and then we’ll go get something to eat, okay?”

 

Lloyd was too stunned to even nod. He had decided that the man with the key was indeed a devil, or even more likely a mirage, and the mirage would stand outside his cell until Lloyd finally dropped dead, talking happily about God and Jesus and Gulden’s Spicy Brown mustard as he made the strange black stone appear and disappear. But now the compassion on the man’s face seemed real enough, and he sounded genuinely disgusted with himself. The black stone disappeared into his clenched fist again. And when the fist opened, Lloyd’s wondering eyes beheld a flat silver key with an ornate grip lying on the stranger’s palm.

 

“My—dear—God! ” Lloyd croaked.

 

“You like that?” the dark man asked, pleased. “I learned that trick from a massage parlor honey in Secaucus, New Jersey, Lloyd. Secaucus, home of the world’s greatest pig farms.”

 

He bent and seated the key in the lock of Lloyd’s cell. And that was strange, because as well as his memory served him (which right now was not very well), these cells had no keyways, because they were all opened and shut electronically. But he had no doubt that the silver key would work.

 

Just as it rattled home, Flagg stopped and looked at Lloyd, grinning slyly, and Lloyd felt despair wash over him again. It was all just a trick.

 

“Did I introduce myself? The name is Flagg, with the double g. Pleased to meet you.”

 

“Likewise,” Lloyd croaked.

 

“And I think, before I open this cell and we go get some dinner, we ought to have a little understanding, Lloyd.”

 

“Sure thing,” Lloyd croaked, and began to cry again.

 

“I’m going to make you my righthand man, Lloyd. Going to put you right up there with Saint Peter. When I open this door, I’m going to slip the keys to the kingdom right into your hand. What a deal, right?”

 

“Yeah,” Lloyd whispered, growing frightened again. It was almost full dark now. Flagg was little more than a dark shape, but his eyes were still perfectly visible. They seemed to glow in the dark like the eyes of a lynx, one to the left of the bar that ended in the lockbox, one to the right. Lloyd felt terror, but something else as well: a kind of religious ecstasy. A pleasure. The pleasure of being chosen. The feeling that he had somehow won through… to something.

 

“You’d like to get even with the people who left you here, isn’t that right?”

 

“Boy, that sure is,” Lloyd said, forgetting his terror momentarily. It was swallowed up by a starving, sinewy anger.

 

“Not just those people, but everyone who would do a thing like that,” Flagg suggested. “It’s a type of person, isn’t it? To a certain type of person, a man like you is nothing but garbage. Because they are high up. They don’t think a person like you has a right to live.”

 

“That’s just right,” Lloyd said. His great hunger had suddenly been changed into a different kind of hunger. It had changed just as surely as the black stone had changed into the silver key. This man had expressed all the complex things he had felt in just a handful of sentences. It wasn’t just the gate-guard he wanted to get even with—why, here’s the wise-ass pusbag, what’s the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say? —because the gate-guard wasn’t the one. The gate-guard had had THE KEY, all right, but the gate-guard had not made THE KEY. Someone had given it to him. The warden, Lloyd supposed, but the warden hadn’t made THE KEY, either. Lloyd wanted to find the makers and forgers. They would be immune to the flu, and he had business with them. Oh yes, and it was good business.

 

“You know what the Bible says about people like that?” Flagg asked quietly. “It says the exalted shall be abased and the mighty shall be brought low and the stiffnecked shall be broken. And you know what it says about people like you, Lloyd? It says blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And it says blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”

 

Lloyd was nodding. Nodding and crying. For a moment it seemed that a blazing corona had formed around Flagg’s head, a light so bright that if Lloyd looked at it for long it would burn his eyes to cinders. Then it was gone… if it had ever been there at all, and it must not have been, because Lloyd had not even lost his night vision.

 

“Now you aren’t very bright,” Flagg said, “but you are the first. And I have the feeling you might be very loyal. You and I, Lloyd, we’re going to go far. It’s a good time for people like us. Everything is starting up for us. All I need is your word.”

 

“W-word?”

 

“That we’re going to stick together, you and me. No denials. No falling asleep on guard duty. There will be others very soon—they’re on their way west already—but for now, there’s just us. I’ll give you the key if you give me your promise.”

 

“I… promise,” Lloyd said, and the words seemed to hang in the air, vibrating strangely. He listened to that vibration, his head cocked to one side, and he could almost see those two words, glowing as darkly as the aurora borealis reflected in a dead man’s eye.

 

Then he forgot about them as the tumblers made their half-turns inside the lockbox. The next moment the lockbox fell at Flagg’s feet, tendrils of smoke seeping from it.

 

“You’re free, Lloyd. Come on out.”

 

Unbelieving, Lloyd touched the bars hesitantly, as if they might burn him; and indeed, they did seem warm. But when he pushed, the door slid back easily and soundlessly. He stared at his savior, those burning eyes.

 

Something was placed in his hand. The key.

 

“It’s yours now, Lloyd.”

 

“Mine?”

 

Flagg grabbed Lloyd’s fingers and closed them around it… and Lloyd felt it move in his hand, felt it change. He uttered a hoarse cry and his fingers sprang open. The key was gone and in its place was the black stone with the red flaw. He held it up, wondering, and turned it this way and that. Now the red flaw looked like a key, now like a skull, now like a bloody, half-closed eye again.

 

“Mine,” Lloyd answered himself. This time he closed his hand with no help, holding the stone savagely tight.

 

“Shall we get some dinner?” Flagg asked. “We’ve got a lot of driving to do tonight.”

 

“Dinner,” Lloyd said. “All right.”

 

“There’s such a lot to do,” Flagg said happily. “And we’re going to move very fast.” They walked toward the stairs together, past the dead men in their cells. When Lloyd stumbled in weakness, Flagg seized his arm above the elbow and bore him up. Lloyd turned and looked into that grinning face with something more than gratitude. He looked at Flagg with something like love.

---
 

He saw a hundred honky-tonk nightclubs. There were signs that read LIBERAL SLOTS, signs that said BLUEBELL WEDDING CHAPEL and 60-SECOND WEDDING BUT IT’LL LAST A LIFETIME! He saw a Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce halfway through a plate glass window of an adult bookstore. He saw a naked woman hanging upside down from a lamppost. He saw two pages of the Las Vegas Sun go riffling by. The headline that revealed itself over and over again as the paper flapped and turned was PLAGUE GROWS WORSE WASHINGTON MUTE. He saw a gigantic billboard which said NEIL DIAMOND! THE AMERICANA HOTEL JUNE 15—AUGUST 30! Someone had scrawled the words DIE LAS VEGAS FOR YOUR SINS! across the show window of a jewelry store seeming to specialize in nothing but wedding and engagement rings. He saw an overturned grand piano lying in the street like a large dead wooden horse. His eyes were full of these wonders.

 

As he walked on he began to see other signs, their neon dead this midsummer for the first time in years. Flamingo. The Mint. Dunes. Sahara. Glass Slipper. Imperial. But where were the people? Where was the water?

 

Hardly knowing what he was doing, letting his feet pick their own path, Trashcan turned off the Strip. His head dropped forward, his chin resting on his chest. He dozed as he walked. And when his feet tripped over the curbing, when he fell forward and gave himself a bloody nose on the pavement, when he looked up and beheld what was there, he could hardly believe it. Blood ran unnoticed from his nose to his tattered blue shirt. It was as if he was still dozing and this was his dream.

 

A tall white building stretched up to the desert sky, a monolith in the desert, a needle, a monument, every bit as magnificent as the Sphinx or the Great Pyramid. The windows of its eastern face gave off the fire of the rising sun like an omen. In front of this bone-white desert edifice, flanking its entranceway, were two huge gold pyramids. Over the canopy was a great bronze medallion, and carved on it in bas-relief was the snarling head of a lion.

 

Above this, also in bronze, the simple but mighty legend: MGM GRAND HOTEL.

 

But what captured his eyes was what stood on the grassy quadrangle between the parking lot and the entranceway. Trashcan stared, an orgasmic shivering consuming him so fiercely that for a moment he could only prop himself on his bloody hands, the unraveling end of the Ace bandage trailing between them, and stare at the fountain with his faded blue eyes, eyes that were halfway to being glareblind by now. A little groaning noise began to escape him.

 

The fountain was working. It was a gorgeous construction of stone and ivory, chased and inlaid with gold. Colored lights played over the spray, making the water purple, then yellow-orange, then red, then green. The constant ticking patter as the spray fell back into the pool was very loud.

 

“Cibola,” he muttered, and struggled to his feet. His nose was still dripping blood.

 

He began to stagger toward the fountain. His stagger became a trot. The trot became a run, the run a sprint, the sprint a mad dash. His scabbed knees rose, pistonlike, almost to his neck. A word began to fly out of his mouth, a long word like a paper streamer that rose to the sky, bringing people to the windows high above (and who saw them? God, perhaps, or the devil, but certainly not the Trashcan Man). The word grew higher and shriller, longer and longer as he approached the fountain and that word was:

 

“CIIIIIIIIBOLAAAAAAAA!”

 

The final “aahh” sound drew out and out, a sound of all the pleasures that all the people who have ever lived on the earth have ever known, and it ended only when he struck the lip of the fountain chest-high and yanked himself up and over and into a bath of incredible coolness and mercy. He could feel the pores of his body open like a million mouths and slurp the water in like a sponge. He screamed. He lowered his head, snorted in water, and blew it back out in a combined sneeze and cough that sent blood and water and snot against the side of the fountain in a splat. He lowered his head and drank like a cow.

 

“Cibola! Cibola!” Trash cried rapturously. “My life for you!”

 

He dogpaddled his way around the fountain, drank again, then climbed over the edge and fell onto the grass with an awkward thump. It had all been worth it, everything had been worth it. Water cramps struck him and he suddenly threw up with a loud grunt. Even throwing up felt grand.

 

He got to his feet, and holding on to the lip of the fountain with his claw hand, he drank again. This time his belly accepted the gift gratefully.

 

Sloshing like a filled goatskin, he staggered toward the alabaster steps which led to the doors of this fabulous place, steps that led between the golden pyramids. Halfway up the steps, a water cramp struck him and doubled him over. When it passed he lurched gamely onward. The doors were of the revolving type, and it took all his feeble strength to get one of them in motion. He pushed through into a plushy carpeted lobby that seemed miles long. The rug underfoot was thick and lush and cranberry-colored. There was a registration desk, a mail desk, a key desk, the cashiers’ windows. All empty. To his right, beyond an ornamental grilled railing, was the casino. Trashcan Man stared at it in awe—the serried ranks of slot machines like soldiers standing at parade rest, beyond them the roulette and crap tables, the marble railings enclosing the baccarat tables.

 

“Who’s here?” Trash croaked, but no answer came back.

 

He was afraid then, because this was a place of ghosts, a place where monsters might lurk, but the fear was weakened by his weariness. He stumbled down the steps and into the casino, passing the Cub Bar, where Lloyd Henreid sat silently in the deep shadows, watching him and holding a glass of Poland water.

 

He came to a table upholstered in green baize, the mystic legend DEALER MUST HIT 16 AND STAND ON 17 inscribed thereon. Trash climbed up on it and fell instantly asleep. Soon nearly half a dozen men stood around the sleeping ragamuffin that was the Trashcan Man.

 

“What do we do with him?” Ken DeMott asked.

 

“Let him sleep,” Lloyd answered. “Flagg wants him.”

 

“Yeah? Where the Christ is Flagg, anyway?” another asked. Lloyd turned to look at the man, who was balding and stood a full foot taller than Lloyd. Nonetheless, he drew back a step at Lloyd’s gaze. The stone around Lloyd’s neck was the only one that was not solid jet; in the center gleamed a small and disquieting red flaw.

 

“Are you that anxious to see him, Hec?” Lloyd asked.

 

“No,” the balding man said. “Hey, Lloyd, you know I didn’t—”

 

“Sure.” Lloyd looked down at the man sleeping on the blackjack table. “Flagg will be around,” he said. “He’s been waiting for this guy. This guy is something special.”

 

On the table, oblivious of all this, Trashcan Man slept on.

 

 

When the Trashcan Man swam out of sleep on the evening of August 5, he was still lying on the blackjack table in the casino of the MGM Grand Hotel. Sitting backward on a chair in front of him was a young man with lank straw-blond hair and mirror sunglasses. The first thing Trash noticed was the stone which hung about his neck in the V of his open sport-shirt. Black, with a red flaw in the center. Like the eye of a wolf in the night.

 

He tried to say he was thirsty and managed only a weak “Gaw!” sound.

 

“You sure did spend some time in the hot sun, I guess,” Lloyd Henreid said.

 

“Are you him?” Trash whispered. “Are you—”

 

“The big guy? No, I’m not him. Flagg’s in L.A. He knows you’re here, though. I talked to him on the radio this afternoon.”

 

“Is he coming?”

 

“What, just to see you? Hell, no! He’ll be here in his own good time. You and me, guy, we’re just little people. He’ll be here in his own good time.” And he reiterated the question he had asked the tall man that morning, not long after Trashcan Man had stumbled in. “Are you that anxious to see him?”

 

“Yes… no… I don’t know.”

 

“Well, whichever way it turns out to be, you’ll get your chance.”

 

“Thirsty…”

 

“Sure. Here.” He handed over a large thermos filled with cherry Kool-Aid. Trashcan drained it at a draught, then leaned over, holding his belly and groaning. When the cramp had passed, he looked at Lloyd with dumb gratitude.

 

“Think you could eat something?” Lloyd asked.

 

“Yes, I think so.”

 

Lloyd turned to a man standing behind them. The man was idly whirling a roulette wheel, then letting the little white ball bounce and rattle.

 

“Roger, go tell Whitney or Stephanie-Ann to rustle this man up some fries and a couple of hamburgers. Naw, shit, what am I thinking about? He’ll ralph all over the place. Soup. Get him some soup. That okay, man?”

 

“Anything,” Trash said gratefully.

 

“We got a guy here,” Lloyd said, “name of Whitney Horgan, used to be a butcher. He’s a fat, loud sack of shit, but don’t that man know how to cook! Jesus! And they got everything here. The gennies were still running when we moved in, and the freezers’re full. Fucking Vegas! Ain’t it the goddamndest place you ever saw?”

 

“Yeah,” Trash said. He liked Lloyd already, and he didn’t even know his name. “It’s Cibola.”

 

“Say what?”

 

“Cibola. Searched for by many.”

 

“Yeah, been plenty people searchin for it over the years, but most of em go away sort of sorry they found it. Well, you call it whatever you want, buddy—looks like you almost cooked yourself gettin here. What’s your name?”

 

“Trashcan Man.”

 

Lloyd didn’t seem to think this a strange name at all. “Name like that, I bet you used to be a biker.” He stuck out a hand. The tips of his fingers still bore the fading marks of his stay in the Phoenix jail where he had almost died of starvation. “I’m Lloyd Henreid. Pleased to meet you, Trash. Welcome aboard the good ship Lollypop.”

 

Trashcan Man shook the offered hand and had to struggle to keep from weeping with gratitude. So far as he could remember, this was the first time in his life someone had offered to shake his hand. He was here. He had been accepted. At long last he was on the inside of something. He would have walked through twice as much desert as he had for this moment, would have burned the other arm and both legs as well.

 

“Thanks,” he muttered. “Thanks, Mr. Henreid.”

 

“Shit, brother—if you don’t call me Lloyd, we’ll have to throw that soup out.”

 

“Lloyd, then. Thanks, Lloyd.”

 

“That’s better. After you eat, I’ll take you upstairs and put you in a room of your own. We’ll get you doing something tomorrow. The big guy’s got something of his own for you, I think, but until then there’s plenty for you to do. We’ve got some of the place running again, but nowhere near all of it. There’s a crew up at Boulder Dam, trying to get all the power back on. There’s another one working on water supplies. We’ve got scout parties out, we’ve been pulling in six or eight people a day, but we’ll keep you off that detail for a while. Looks like you’ve had enough sun to last you a month.”

 

“I guess I have,” Trashcan Man said with a weak smile. He was already willing to lay down his life for Lloyd Henreid. Gathering up all of his courage, he pointed at the stone which lay in the hollow of Lloyd’s throat. “That—”

 

“Yeah, us guys who are sort of in charge all wear em. His idea. It’s jet. Not really a rock at all, you know. It’s like an oil bubble.”

 

“I mean… the red light. The eye.”

 

“Looks like that to you too, huh? It’s a flaw. Special from him. I’m not the smartest guy he’s got, not even the smartest guy in good ole Lost Wages, not by a long shot. But I’m… shit, I guess you’d say I’m his mascot.” He looked closely at Trash. “Maybe you too, who knows? Not me, that’s for sure. He’s a close one, Flagg is. Anyway, we heard about you special. Me and Whitney. That’s not the regular drill at all. Too many comin in to take special notice of many.” He paused. “Although I guess he could, if he wanted to. I guess he could take notice of just about anybody.”

 

Trashcan Man nodded.

 

“He can do magic,” Lloyd said, his voice becoming slightly hoarse. “I seen it. I’d hate to be the people against him, you know?”

 

“Yes,” Trashcan said. “I saw what happened to The Kid.”

 

“What kid?”

 

“The guy I was with until we got into the mountains.” He shuddered. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

 

“Okay, man. Here comes your soup. And Whitney put a burger on the side after all. You’ll love it. The guy makes great burgers, but try not to puke, okay?”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Me, I got places to go and people to see. If my old buddy Poke could see me now, he’d never believe it. I’m busier’n a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. Catch you later.”

 

“Sure,” Trashcan said, and then added, almost timidly: “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

 

“Don’t thank me,” Lloyd said amiably. “Thank him.”

 

“I do,” Trashcan Man said. “Every night.” But he was talking to himself. Lloyd was already halfway down the lobby, talking with the man who had brought the soup and the hamburger. Trashcan Man watched them fondly until they were out of sight, and then he began to chow down, eating ravenously until almost everything was gone. He would have been fine if he hadn’t looked down into the soup bowl. It was tomato soup, and it was the color of blood.

---
 

On August 7, Lloyd Henreid came to the room in which the dehydrated and semidelirious Trashcan Man had been installed the day before. It was a fine room, on the thirtieth floor of the MGM Grand. There was a round bed with silk sheets, and a round mirror which looked to be the exact same size as the bed, mounted on the ceiling.

 

Trashcan Man looked at Lloyd.

 

“How you feeling, Trash?” Lloyd asked, looking back.

 

“Good,” Trashcan Man said. “Better.”

 

“Some food and water and rest, that’s all you needed,” Lloyd said. “I brought you some clean clothes. Had to guess at the sizes.”

 

“They look fine.” Trash had never really been able to remember his sizes. He took the jeans and the workshirt Lloyd offered.

 

“Come on down to breakfast when you’re dressed,” Lloyd said. He spoke almost deferentially. “Most of us eat in the deli.”

 

“Okay. Sure.”

 

The deli hummed with conversation, and he paused outside and around the corner, suddenly overcome with fright. They would look up at him when he came in. They would look up and laugh. Someone would start giggling in the back of the room, someone else would join in, and then the whole place would be an uproar of laughter and pointing fingers.

 

Hey, put away ya matches, here comes the Trashcan Man!

 

Hey, Trash! What did ole lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?

 

Wet the bed much, Trashy?

 

Sweat popped out on his skin, making him feel slimy in spite of the shower he’d taken after Lloyd left. He remembered his face in the bathroom mirror, covered with slowly healing scabs, his body, too gaunt, his eyes, too small for their yawning sockets. Yes, they would laugh. He listened to the hum of conversation, the clink of silverware, and thought he should just slink away.

 

Then he thought of the way the wolf had taken his hand, so gently, and had led him away from The Kid’s metal tomb, and Trash squared his shoulders and walked inside.

 

A few people looked up briefly, then went back to their meals and their conversations. Lloyd, at a big table in the middle of the room, raised an arm and waved him over. Trash threaded his way among the tables and under a darkened electronic Keno toteboard. There were three other people at the table. They were all eating ham and scrambled eggs.

 

“Serve yourself,” Lloyd said. “It’s a steam-table kinda thing.”

 

Trashcan Man got a tray and served himself. The man behind the counter, large and dressed in dirty cook’s whites, watched him.

 

“Are you Mr. Horgan?” Trashcan Man asked timidly.

 

Horgan grinned, exposing gapped teeth. “Yeah, but we won’t get nowhere with you callin me that, boy. You call me Whitey. You feelin a little better? When you came in, you looked like the wratha God.”

 

“Much better, sure.”

 

“Dig in those aigs. All you want. Go light on the home fries, though. I would, at least. Them taters is old and tough. Good to have you here, boy.”

 

“Thanks,” Trash said.

 

He went back to Lloyd’s table.

 

“Trash, this here is Ken DeMott. The fella with the bald spot is Hector Drogan. And this kid tryin to grow on his face what springs up wild in his asshole calls himself Ace High.”

 

They all nodded at him.

 

“This is our new boy,” Lloyd said. “Name’s Trashcan Man.”

 

Hands were shaken all around. Trash started to dig into his eggs. He looked up at the young man with the scraggly beard and said in a low, polite voice: “Would you pass the salt, please, Mr. High?”

 

There was a moment of surprise as they looked at each other, and then they all burst into laughter. Trash stared at them, feeling the panic rise in his chest, and then he heard the laughter, really heard it, with his mind as well as his ears, and understood that there was no meanness in it. No one here was going to ask him why he hadn’t burned down the school instead of the church. No one here was going to dun him about old lady Semple’s pension check. He could smile too, if he wanted. And he did.

 

“Mr. High,” Hector Drogan was giggling. “Oh, Ace, you just been had. Mr. High, I love it. Meeestair Haaaaah. Man, that is so fuckin rich.”

 

Ace High handed Trashcan the salt. “Just Ace, my man. That’ll get me every time. You don’t call me Mr. High and I won’t call you Mr. Man, that a deal?”

 

“Okay,” Trashcan Man said, still smiling. “That’s fine.”

 

“Oh, Mr. Hiiiigh?” Heck Drogan said in a coy falsetto. Then he burst into laughter again. “Ace, you never gonna live that down. I swear you won’t.”

 

“Maybe not, but I’m sure-God gonna live it up,” Ace High said, and got up with his plate for more eggs. His hand closed for a moment on Trashcan Man’s shoulder as he went. The hand was warm and solid. It was a friendly hand that did not squeeze or pinch.

 

Trashcan Man dug into his eggs, feeling warm and good inside. This warmth and goodness was so foreign to his nature that it almost felt like a disease. As he ate he tried to isolate it, understand it. He looked up, looked at the faces around him, and thought he might understand what it was.

 

Happiness.

 

What a good bunch of people, he thought.

 

And on the heels of that: I’m home.

---
 

A hand grasped his elbow. It was Lloyd. His face looked white and strained. “I been lookin for you. He wants to see you later. Meantime, we got this. God, I hate these. Come on. I need help and you’re elected.”

 

Trashcan Man’s head was whirling. He wanted to see him! Him! But in the meantime there was this… whatever this was.

 

“What, Lloyd? What is it?”

 

Lloyd didn’t answer. Still holding lightly to Trashcan Man’s arm, he led him toward the fountain. The crowd parted before them, almost shrank from them. The narrow corridor they passed through seemed to be insulated with a still cold layer of loathing and fear.

 

Standing at the front of the crowd was Whitney Horgan. He was smoking a cigarette. One of his Hush Puppies was propped on the object Trash hadn’t been quite able to make out before. It was a wooden cross. Its vertical piece was about twelve feet long. It looked like a crude lowercase t.

 

“Everyone here?” Lloyd asked.

 

“Yeah,” Whitey said, “I guess they are. Winky took roll-call. We got nine guys out of state. Flagg said never mind about them. How are you holding up, Lloyd?”

 

“I’ll be fine,” Lloyd said. “Well… not fine, but you know—I’ll get through it.”

 

Whitey cocked his head toward Trashcan Man. “How much does the kid know?”

 

“I don’t know anything,” Trashcan said, more confused than ever. Hope, awe, and dread were all in dubious battle within him. “What is this? Someone said something about Heck—”

 

“Yeah, it’s Heck,” Lloyd said. “He’s been freebasing. Fucking blow, don’t I hate the goddam fucking blow. Go on, Whitey, tell em to bring him out.”

 

Whitey moved away from Lloyd and Trash, stepping over a rectangular hole in the ground. The hole had been throated with cement. It looked just the right size and depth to take the butt end of the cross. As Whitney “Whitey” Horgan trotted up the wide steps between the gold pyramids, Trashcan Man felt all the spit in his mouth dry up. He suddenly turned, first to the silent crowd, waiting in its crescent formation under the blue sky, then to Lloyd, who stood pale and silent, looking at the cross and picking the white head of a pimple on his chin.

 

“You… we… nail him up?” Trashcan managed at last. “Is that what this is about?”

 

Lloyd reached suddenly into the pocket of his faded shirt. “You know, I got something for you. He gave it to me to give to you. I can’t make you take it, but it’s a goddam good thing for me that I remembered to at least make the offer. Do you want it?”

 

From his breast pocket he drew a fine gold chain with a black jet stone on the end of it. The stone was flawed with a tiny red spot, as was Lloyd’s own. He dangled it before Trashcan Man’s eyes like a hypnotist’s amulet.

 

The truth was in Lloyd’s eyes, too clear not to be recognized, and Trashcan Man knew he could never weep and grovel—not before him, not before anybody, but especially not before him —and claim he hadn’t understood. Take this and you take everything, Lloyd’s eyes said. And what’s apart of everything? Why, Heck Drogan, of course. Heck and the cement-lined hole in the ground, the hole just big enough to take the butt end of Heck’s cross-tree.

 

He reached for it slowly. His hand paused just before the outstretched fingers could touch the gold chain.

 

This is my last chance. My last chance to be Donald Merwin Elbert.

 

But another voice, one which spoke with greater authority (but with a certain gentleness, like a cool hand on a fevered brow), told him that the time of choices had long since passed. If he chose Donald Merwin Elbert now, he would die. He had sought the dark man of his own free will (if there is such a thing for the Trashcan Men of the world), had accepted the dark man’s favors. The dark man had saved him from dying at the hands of The Kid (that the dark man might have sent The Kid for just that purpose never crossed Trashcan Man’s mind), and surely that meant his life was now a debt he owed to that same dark man… the man some of them here called the Walkin Dude. His life! Had he not himself offered it again and again?

 

But your soul… did you offer your soul as well?

 

In for a penny, in for a pound, the Trashcan Man thought, and gently put one hand around the gold chain and the other around the dark stone. The stone was cold and smooth. He held it in his fist for a moment just to see if he could warm it up. He didn’t think he would be able to, and he was right. So he put it around his neck, where it lay against his skin like a tiny ball of ice.

 

But he didn’t mind that icy feeling.

 

That icy feeling counterbalanced the fire which was always in his mind.

 

“Just tell yourself you don’t know him,” Lloyd said. “Heck, I mean. That’s what I always do. It makes it easier. It—”

 

Two of the wide hotel doors banged open. Frantic, terrified screams floated across to them. The crowd sighed.

 

A party of nine came down the steps. Hector Drogan was in the center. He was fighting like a tiger caught in a net. His face was dead pale except for two hectic blots of color riding high up on his cheekbones. Sweat was pouring off every inch of skin in rivers. He was mother-naked. Five men were holding on to him. One of them was Ace High, the kid Heck had been ribbing about his name.

 

“Ace!” Hector was babbling. “Hey, Ace, what do you say? Little help for the kid, okay? Tell them to quit this, man—I can get clean, I swear to God I can clean up my act. What do you say? Little help here! Please, Ace!”

 

Ace High said nothing; simply tightened his grip on Heck’s thrashing arm. It was answer enough. Hector Drogan began to scream again. He was dragged relentlessly across the pavilion and toward the fountain.

 

Behind him, walking in line like a solemn undertaker’s party, were three men: Whitney Horgan, carrying a large carpetbag; a man named Roy Hoopes, with a stepladder; and Winky Winks, a bald man whose eyes twitched constantly. Winky was carrying a clipboard with a typed sheet of paper on it.

 

Heck was dragged to the foot of the cross. A horrible yellow smell of fear was radiating out from him; his eyes rolled, showing the muddy whites, like the eyes of a horse left out in a thunderstorm.

 

“Hey, Trashy,” he said hoarsely as Roy Hoopes set up the stepladder behind him. “Trashcan Man. Tell em to cut it out, buddy. Tell them I can get clean. Tell them a scare like this is better’n all the fuckin rehabs in the world. Tell em, man.”

 

Trashcan stared down at his feet. As he bent his neck, the black stone swung out from his chest and into his field of vision. The red flaw, the eye, seemed to be staring up at him fixedly.

 

“I don’t know you,” he mumbled.

 

From the tail of his eye he saw Whitey down on one knee, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, his left eye squinted against the smoke. He opened the carpetbag. He was taking out sharp wooden nails. To Trashcan Man’s horrified gaze, they looked almost as big as tentpegs. He laid the nails on the grass and then removed a large wooden mallet from the carpetbag.

 

In spite of the murmuring voices all around them, Trashcan Man’s words seemed to have penetrated the panicky haze in Hector brogan’s mind. “What do you mean, you don’t know me?” he cried wildly. “We had breakfast together just two days ago! You called the kid there Mr. High. What do you mean you don’t know me, you chickenshit little liar? ”

 

“I don’t know you at all,” Trash repeated, a little more clearly this time. And what he felt was almost a sense of relief. All he saw here in front of him was a stranger, a stranger who looked a bit like Carley Yates. His hand went to the stone and curled around it. Its coolness reassured him further.

 

“You liar! ” Heck screamed. He began to struggle again, his muscles flexing and pumping, the sweat trickling down his bare chest and arms. “You liar! You do so know me! You do so, you liar! ”

 

“No I don’t. I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you.”

 

Heck began to scream again. The four men holding him bore down, panting and out of breath.

 

“Go ahead,” Lloyd said.

 

Heck was dragged backward. One of the men holding him stuck out a leg and tripped him. He landed half on the cross and half off it. Meanwhile, Winky had begun to read the typed sheet on his clipboard in a high voice that sliced through Heck’s screams like the howl of a buzz-saw.

 

“Attention attention attention! By the order of Randall Flagg, Leader of the People and First Citizen, this man, Hector Alonzo Drogan by name, is ordered executed by an act of crucifixion, this penalty so ordered for the crime of drug use.”

 

“No! No! No! ” Heck screamed in frenzied counterpoint. His left arm, greasy with sweat, escaped Ace High’s hold, and instinctively Trash knelt and pinned the arm back down, forcing the wrist against an arm of the cross. A second later, Whitey was kneeling beside Trashcan with the wooden mallet and two of the crude nails. The cigarette still hung from the corner of his mouth. He looked like a man about to do a little job of carpentering in his back yard.

 

“Yeah, good, hold him just like that, Trash. I’ll staple him. Won’t take a minute.”

 

“Drug use is not allowed in this Society of the People because it impairs the user’s ability to contribute fully to the Society of the People,” Winky was proclaiming. He spoke fast, like an auctioneer, and his eyes bunched and scrunched and wiggled. “Specifically in this case, the accused Hector brogan was found with freebasing paraphernalia and a large supply of cocaine.”

 

Now Heck’s screams had reached a pitch that might well have shattered crystal, if there had been any crystal around to shatter. His head lashed from side to side. There was foam on his lips. Ribbons of blood coursed down his arms as six of them, Trashcan Man included, lifted the cross into the cement pit. Now Hector Drogan was silhouetted against the sky with his head thrown back in a rictus of pain.

 

“—is done for the good of this Society of the People,” Winky screamed relentlessly. “This communication ends with a solemn warning and greetings to the People of Las Vegas. Let this bill of true facts be nailed above the miscreant’s head, and let it be marked with the seal of the First Citizen, RANDALL FLAGG by name.”

 

“Oh my God it HURTS! ” Hector Drogan screamed from above them. “Oh my God my God oh God God God! ”

 

The crowd remained for almost an hour, each person afraid to be remarked upon as having been the first to leave. There was disgust on many faces, a drowsy kind of excitement on many others… but if there was a common denominator, it was fear.

 

Trashcan Man wasn’t frightened, though. Why should he have been frightened? He hadn’t known the man.

 

He hadn’t known him at all.

---

 

It was quarter past ten that night when Lloyd came back to Trashcan Man’s room. He glanced at Trash and said, “You’re dressed. Good. I thought you might have gone to bed already.”

 

“No,” Trashcan Man said, “I’m up. Why?”

 

Lloyd’s voice dropped. “It’s now, Trashy. He wants to see you. Flagg.”

 

“He—?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Trashcan Man was transported. “Where is he? My life for him, oh yes—”

 

“Top floor,” Lloyd said. “He got in just after we finished burning Drogan’s body. From the Coast. He was just here when Whitey and I got back from the landfill. No one ever sees him come or go, Trash, but they always know when he’s taken off again. Or when he comes back. Come on, let’s go.”

 

Four minutes later the elevator arrived at the top floor and Trashcan Man, his face alight and his eyes goggling, stepped out. Lloyd did not.

 

Trash turned toward him. “Aren’t you—?”

 

Lloyd managed a smile, but it was a sorry affair. “No, he wants to see you alone. Good luck, Trash.”

 

And before he could say anything else, the elevator door had slid shut and Lloyd was gone.

---

 

Dayna Jurgens lay naked in the huge double bed, listening to the steady hiss of water coming from the shower, and looked up at her reflection in the big circular ceiling mirror, which was the exact shape and size of the bed it reflected. She thought that the female body always looks its best when it is flat on its back, stretched out, the tummy pulled flat, the breasts naturally upright without the vertical drag of gravity to pull them down. It was nine-thirty in the morning, September 8. The Judge had been dead about eighteen hours, Bobby Terry considerably less—unfortunately for him.

 

The shower ran on and on.

 

There’s a man with a cleanliness compulsion, she thought. I wonder what happened to him that makes him want to shower for half an hour at a stretch?

 

Her mind turned back to the Judge. Who would have figured that? In its own way, it was a damned brilliant idea. Who would have suspected an old man? Well, Flagg had, it seemed. Somehow he had known when and approximately where. A picket line had been set up all the way along the Idaho-Oregon border, with orders to kill him.

 

But the job had been botched somehow. Since suppertime last night, the upper echelon here in Las Vegas had been walking around with pasty faces and downcast eyes. Whitney Horgan, who was one damned fine cook, had served something that looked like dog food and was too burned to taste like much of anything. The Judge was dead, but something had gone wrong.

 

She got up and walked to the window and looked out over the desert. She saw two big Las Vegas High School buses trundling west on US 95 in the hot sunshine, headed out toward the Indian Springs airbase, where, she knew, a daily seminar in the art and craft of jet planes went on. There were over a dozen people in the West who knew how to fly, but by great good luck—for the Free Zone—none of them were checked out for the National Guard jets at Indian Springs.

 

But they were learning. Oh my, yes.

 

What was most important for her right now about the Judge’s demise was that they had known when they had no business knowing. Was there a spy of their own back in the Free Zone? That was possible, she supposed; spying was a game two could play at. But Sue Stern had told her that the decision to send spies into the West had been strictly a committee thing, and she doubted very much if any of those seven were in the Flagg bag. Mother Abagail would have known if one of the committee had turned rotten, for one thing. Dayna was sure of it.

 

That left a very unappetizing alternative. Flagg himself had just known.

 

Dayna had been in Las Vegas eight days as of today, and as far as she could tell she was a fully accepted member of the community. She had already accumulated enough information about the operation over here to scare the living Jesus out of everyone back in Boulder. It would only take the news about the jet plane training program to do that. But the thing that frightened her the most personally was the way people turned away from you if you mentioned Flagg’s name, the way they pretended they hadn’t heard. Some of them would cross their fingers, or genuflect, or make the sign of the evil eye behind one cupped hand. He was the great There/Not-There.

 

That was by day. By night, if you would just sit quietly by in the Cub Bar of the Grand or the Silver Slipper Room at The Cashbox, you heard stories about him, the beginning of myth. They talked slowly, haltingly, not looking at each other, drinking bottles of beer mostly. If you drank something stronger, you might lose control of your mouth, and that was dangerous. She knew that not all of what they said was the truth, but it was already impossible to separate the gilt embroidery from the whole cloth. She had heard he was a shape-changer, a werewolf, that he had started the plague himself, that he was the Antichrist whose coming was foretold in Revelation. She heard about the crucifixion of Hector Drogan, how he had just known Heck was freebasing… the way he had just known that the Judge was on the way, apparently.

 

And he was never referred to as Flagg in these nightly discussions; it was as if they believed that to call him by name was to summon him like a djinn from a bottle. They called him the dark man. The Walkin Dude. The tall man. And Ratty Erwins called him Old Creeping Judas.

 

If he had known about the Judge, didn’t it stand to reason that he knew about her?

 

The shower turned off.

 

Keep it together, sweetie. He encourages the mumbo jumbo. It makes him look taller. It could be that he does have a spy in the Free Zone—it wouldn’t necessarily have to be someone on the committee, just someone who told him Judge Farris wasn’t the defector type.

 

“You shouldn’t walk around like that with no clothes on, sweetbuns. You’ll get me horny all over again.”

 

She turned toward him, her smile rich and inviting, thinking that she would like to take him downstairs to the kitchen and stuff that thing he was so goddam proud of into Whitney Horgan’s industrial meat-grinder. “Why do you think I was walking around with no clothes on?”

 

He looked at his watch. “Well, we got maybe forty minutes.” His penis was already beginning to make twitching movements… like a divining rod, Dayna thought with sour amusement.

 

“Well, come on then.” He came toward her and she pointed at his chest. “And take that thing off. It gives me the creeps.”

 

Lloyd Henreid looked down at the amulet, dark teardrop marked with a single red flaw, and slipped it off. He put it on the night table and the fine-linked chain made a little hissing sound. “Better?”

 

“All kinds of better.”

 

She held out her arms. A moment later he was on top of her. A moment after that he was thrusting into her.

 

“You like that?” he panted. “You like the way that feels, sweetie?”

 

“God, I love it,” she moaned, thinking of the meat-grinder, all white enamel and gleaming steel.

 

“What?”

 

“I said I love it!” she screamed.

 

She faked an orgasm shortly after that, tossing her hips wildly, crying out. He came seconds later (she had shared Lloyd’s bed for four days now, and had his rhythms timed almost perfectly), and as she felt his semen beginning to run down her thigh, she happened to glance over at the night table.

 

Black stone.

 

Red flaw.

 

It seemed to be staring at her.

 

She had a sudden horrible feeling that it was staring at her, that it was his eye with its contact lens of humanity removed, staring at her as the Eye of Sauron had stared at Frodo from the dark fastness of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, where the shadows lie.

 

It sees me, she thought with hopeless horror in that defenseless moment before rationality reasserted itself. More: it sees THROUGH me.

 

Afterward, as she had hoped, Lloyd talked. That was part of his rhythm, too. He would put an arm around her bare shoulders, smoke a cigarette, look up at their reflections in the mirror over the bed, and tell her what was going on.

 

“Glad I wasn’t that Bobby Terry,” he said. “No sir, no way. The main man wanted that old fart’s head without so much as a bruise on it. Wanted to send it back over the Rockies. And look what happened. That numbnuts puts two .45 slugs into his face. At close range. I guess he deserved what he got, but I’m glad I wasn’t there.”

 

“What happened to him?”

 

“Sweetbuns, don’t ask.”

 

“How did he know? The big guy?”

 

“He was there.”

 

She felt a chill.

 

“Just happened to be there?”

 

“Yeah. He just happens to be anywhere that there’s trouble. Jesus Christ, when I think what he did to Eric Strellerton, that smartass lawyer me and Trashy went to LA with…”

 

“What did he do?”

 

For a long time she didn’t think he was going to answer. Usually she could gently push him in the direction she wanted him to go by asking a series of soft, respectful questions; making him feel as if he was (in the never-to-be-forgotten words of her kid sister) King Shit of Turd Mountain. But this time she had a feeling she had pushed too far until Lloyd said in a funny, squeezed voice:

 

“He just looked at him. Eric was laying down all this funky shit about how he wanted to see the Vegas operation run… we should do this, we should do that. Poor old Trash—he ain’t all the way together himself, you know—was just staring at him like he was a TV actor or something. Eric’s pacing back and forth like he’s addressing a jury and like it was already proved he was going to get his own way. And he says—real soft—‘Eric.’ Like that. And Eric looked at him. I didn’t see nothing. But Eric just looked at him for a long time. Maybe five minutes. His eyes just got bigger and bigger… and then he started to drool… and then he started to giggle… and he giggled right along with Eric, and that scared me. When Flagg laughs, you get scared. But Eric just kept right on giggling, and then he said, ‘When you go back, drop him off in the Mojave.’ And that’s what we did. And for all I know, Eric’s wandering around out there right now. He looked at Eric for five minutes and drove him out of his mind.”

 

He took a large drag on his cigarette and crushed it out. Then he slung an arm around her. “Why are we talkin about bad shit like that?”

 

“I don’t know… how’s it going out at Indian Springs?”

 

Lloyd brightened. The Indian Springs project was his baby. “Good. Real good. We’re going to have three guys checked out on the Skyhawk planes by the first of October, maybe sooner. Hank Rawson really looks great. And that Trashcan Man, he’s a fucking genius. About some things he’s not too bright, but when it comes to weapons, he’s incredible.”

 

She had met Trashcan Man twice. Both times she had felt a chill slip over her when his strange, muddy eyes happened to light upon her, and a palpable sense of relief when those eyes passed on. It was obvious that many of the others—Lloyd, Hank Rawson, Ronnie Sykes, the Rat-Man—saw him as a kind of mascot, a good luck charm. One of his arms was a horrid mass of freshly healed burn tissue, and she remembered something peculiar that had happened two nights ago. Hank Rawson had been talking. He put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, and finished what he was saying before lighting the cigarette and shaking out the match. Dayna saw the way that Trashcan Man’s eyes homed in on the match flame, the way his breathing seemed to stop. It was as if his whole being had focused on the tiny flame. It was like watching a starving man contemplate a nine-course dinner. Then Hank shook out the match and dropped the blackened stub into an ashtray. The moment had ended.

 

“He’s good with weapons?” she asked Lloyd.

 

“He’s great with them. The Skyhawks have under-wing missiles, air-to-ground. Shrikes. Weird how they name all that shit, isn’t it? No one could figure out how the goddam things went on the planes. No one could figure out how to arm them or safety-control them. Christ, it took us most of one day to figure out how to get them off the storage racks. So Hank says, ‘We better get Trashy out here when he gets back and see if he can figure it out.’”

 

“When he gets back?”

 

“Yeah, he’s a funny dude. He’s been in Vegas almost a week now, but he’ll be taking off again pretty quick.”

 

“Where does he go?”

 

“Into the desert. He takes a Land-Rover and just goes. He’s a strange guy, I tell you. In his way, Trash is almost as strange as the big guy himself. West of here there’s nothing but empty desert and godforsaken waste. I ought to know. I did time way up west in a hellhole called Brownsville Station. I don’t know how he lives out there, but he does. He looks for new toys, and he always comes back with a few. About a week after him and me got back from L.A., he brought back a pile of army machine guns with laser sights—never-miss machine guns, Hank calls them. This time it was Teller mines, contact mines, fragment mines, and a canister of Parathion. He said he found a whole stockpile of Parathion. Also enough defoliant to turn the whole state of Colorado bald as an egg.”

 

“Where does he find it?”

 

“Everywhere,” Lloyd said simply. “He sniffs it out, sweetbuns. It isn’t really so strange. Most of western Nevada and eastern California was owned by the good old U.S.A. It’s where they tested their toys, all the way up to A-bombs. He’ll be dragging one of those back someday.”

 

He laughed. Dayna felt cold, terribly cold.

 

“The superflu started somewhere out here. I’d lay money on it. Maybe Trash will find it. I tell you, he just sniffs that stuff out. The big guy says just give him his head and let him run, and so that’s what he does. You know what his favorite toy is right now?”

 

“No,” Dayna said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know… but why else had she come over here?

 

“Flametracks.”

 

“What are flametrucks?”

 

“Not trucks, tracks. He’s got five of them out at Indian Springs, lined up like Formula One racecars.” Lloyd laughed. “They used them in the Nam. The grunts called them Zippos. They’re full of napalm. Trash loves em.”

 

“Neato,” she muttered.

 

“Anyway, when Trash came back this time, we took him out to the Springs. He hummed and muttered around those Shrikes and got them armed and mounted in about six hours. Can you believe that? They train Air Force technicians about ninety years to do stuff like that. But they’re not Trash, you see. He’s a fucking genius.”

 

Idiot savant, you mean. I bet I know how he got those burns, too.

 

Lloyd looked at his watch and sat up. “Speaking of Indian Springs, I got to get out there. Just got time for another shower. You want to join me?”

 

“Not this time.”

 

She got dressed after the shower began to run again. So far she had always managed to get dressed and undressed with him out of the room, and that was the way she intended to keep it.

 

She strapped the clip to her forearm and slid the switchblade knife into its spring-loaded clasp. A quick twist of her wrist would deliver all ten inches of it into her hand.

 

Well, she thought as she slipped into her blouse, a girl has to have some secrets.

---

 

“Wake up! Wake up! Goddammit, wake up, you bitch!”

 

She was coming out of murky sleep when a foot caught her in the small of the back, knocking her out of the big round bed and onto the floor. She came awake at once, blinking and confused.

 

Lloyd was there, looking down at her with cold anger. Whitney Horgan. Ken DeMott. Ace High. Jenny. Only Jenny’s usually open face was also blank and cold.

 

“Jen—?”

 

No answer. Dayna got up on her knees, dimly aware of her nakedness, more aware of the cold circle of faces looking down at her. The expression on Lloyd’s face was that of a man who has been betrayed and has discovered the betrayal.

 

Am I dreaming this?

 

“Get the fuck dressed, you lying, spying bitch!”

 

Okay, so it was no dream. She felt a sinking terror in her stomach that seemed almost preordained. They had known about the Judge, and now they knew about her. He had told them. She glanced at the clock on the night table. It was quarter of four in the morning. The Hour of the Secret Police, she thought.

 

“Where is he?” she asked.

 

“Around,” Lloyd said grimly. His face was pale and shiny. His amulet lay in the open V of his shirt. “You’ll wish he wasn’t before long.”

 

“Lloyd?”

 

“What.”

 

“I gave you VD, Lloyd. I hope it rots off.”

 

He kicked her just below the breastbone, knocking her on her back.

 

“I hope it rots off, Lloyd.”

 

“Shut up and get dressed.”

 

“Get out of here. I don’t dress in front of any man.”

 

Lloyd kicked her again, this time in the bicep of her right arm. The pain was tremendous and her mouth drew down in a quivering bow but she didn’t cry out.

 

“You in a little hot water, Lloyd? Sleeping with Mata Hari?” She grinned at him with tears of pain standing in her eyes.

 

“Come on, Lloyd,” Whitney Horgan said. He saw murder in Lloyd’s eyes and now stepped forward quickly and put a hand on Lloyd’s arm. “We’ll go in the living room. Jenny can watch her get dressed.”

 

“And what if she decides to jump out the window?”

 

“She won’t get the chance,” Jenny said. Her broad face was dead blank, and for the first time Dayna noticed she was wearing a pistol on her hip.

 

“She can’t anyway,” Ace High said. “The windows up here are just for show, didn’t you know that? Sometimes big losers at the tables get wanting to take a high dive, and that would be bad publicity for the hotel. So they don’t open.” His eyes fell on Dayna, and they held a touch of compassion. “Now you, babe, you’re a real big loser.”

 

“Come on, Lloyd,” Whitney said again. “You’re going to do something you’ll be sorry for later—kick her in the head or something—if you don’t get out of here.”

 

“Okay.” They went to the door together, and Lloyd looked back over his shoulder. “He’s going to make it bad for you, you bitch.”

 

“You were the crappiest lover I ever had, Lloyd,” she said sweetly.

 

He tried to lunge back at her, but Whitney and Ken DeMott held him back and drew him through the doorway. The double doors closed with a low snicking sound.

 

“Get dressed, Dayna,” Jenny said.

 

Dayna stood up, still rubbing the purpling bruise on her arm. “You people like that?” she asked. “Is that where you’re at? People like Lloyd Henreid?”

 

“You were the one sleeping with him, not me.” Her face showed an emotion for the first time: angry reproach. “You think it’s nice to come over here and spy on folks? You deserve everything you’re going to get. And, sister, you’re going to get a lot.”

 

“I was sleeping with him for a reason.” She drew on her panties. “And I was spying for a reason.”

 

“Why don’t you just shut up?”

 

Dayna turned and looked at Jenny. “What do you think they’re doing here, girl? Why do you think they’re learning to fly those jets out at Indian Springs? Those Shrike missiles, do you think they’re so Flagg can win his girl a Kewpie doll at the country fair?”

 

Jenny pressed her lips tightly together. “That’s none of my business.”

 

“Will it be none of your business if they use the jets to fly over the Rockies next spring and the missiles to wipe out everyone living there?”

 

“I hope they do. It’s us or you people; that’s what he says. And I believe him.”

 

“They believed Hitler, too. But you don’t believe him; you’re just scared gutless of him.”

 

“Get dressed, Dayna.”

 

Dayna pulled on her slacks, buttoned them, zipped them. Then she put her hand to her mouth. “I… I think I’m going to throw up… God!…” Clutching her long-sleeved blouse in her hand, she turned and ran into the bathroom and locked the door. She made loud retching noises.

 

“Open the door, Dayna! Open it or I’ll shoot the lock out of it!”

 

“Sick—” She made another loud retching noise. Standing on tiptoe, she felt along the top of the medicine cabinet, thanking God she had left the knife and its spring clip up here, praying for another twenty seconds—

 

She had the clip. She strapped it on. Now there were other voices in the bedroom.

 

With her left hand she turned on the water in the basin. “Just a minute, I’m sick, dammit!”

 

But they weren’t going to give her a minute. Someone dealt the bathroom door a kick and it shuddered in its frame. Dayna clicked the knife home. It lay along her forearm like a deadly arrow. Moving with desperate speed, she yanked the blouse on and buttoned the sleeves. Splashed water on her mouth. Flushed the toilet.

 

Another kick dealt to the door. Dayna twisted the knob and they burst in, Lloyd looking wild-eyed, Jenny standing behind Ken DeMott and Ace High, her pistol drawn.

 

“I puked,” Dayna said coldly. “Too bad you couldn’t watch it, huh?”

 

Lloyd grabbed her by the shoulder and threw her out into the bedroom. “I ought to break your neck, you cunt.”

 

“Remember your master’s voice.” She buttoned the front of her blouse, sweeping them with her flashing eyes. “He’s your dog-god, isn’t that right? Kiss his ass and you belong to him.”

 

“You better just shut up,” Whitney said gruffly. “You’re only making it worse for yourself.”

 

She looked at Jenny, unable to understand how the openly smiling, bawdy day-girl could have changed into this blank-faced night-thing. “Don’t you see that he’s getting ready to start it all over again?” she asked them desperately. “The killing, the shooting… the plague? ”

 

“He’s the biggest and the strongest,” Whitney said with curious gentleness. “He’s going to wipe you people off the face of the earth.”

 

“No more talk,” Lloyd said. “Let’s go.”

 

They moved to take her arms, but she stepped away, holding her arms across her body, and shook her head. “I’ll walk,” she said.

 

The casino was deserted except for a number of men with rifles, sitting or standing by the doors. They seemed to find interesting things to look at on the walls, the ceilings, and the bare gaming tables as the elevator doors opened and Lloyd’s party stepped out, herding Dayna along.

 

She was taken to the gate at the end of the rank of cashiers’ windows. Lloyd opened it with a small key and they stepped through. She was herded quickly through an area that looked like a bank: there were adding machines, wastebaskets full of paper tapes, jars of rubber bands and paper clips. Computer screens, now gray and blank. Cash drawers ajar. Money had spilled out some of them and lay on the tile floors. Most of the bills were fifties and hundreds.

 

At the rear of the cashiers’ area, Whitney opened another door and Dayna was led down a carpeted hallway to an empty receptionist’s office. Tastefully decorated. Free-form white desk for a tasteful secretary who had died, coughing and hacking up great green gobbets of phlegm, some months ago. A picture on the wall that looked like a Klee print. A mellow light-brown shag rug. The antechamber to the seat of power.

 

Fear trickled into the hollows of her body like cold water, stiffening her up, making her feel awkward. Lloyd leaned over the desk and flicked the toggle switch there. Dayna saw that he was sweating lightly. “We have her, R.F.”

 

She felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside her and was helpless to stop it—not that she cared. “R.F.! R.F.! Oh, that’s good! Ready when you are, C.B.!” She went off into a gale of giggles, and suddenly Jenny slapped her.

 

“Shut up!” she hissed. “You don’t know what you’re in for.”

 

“I know,” Dayna said, looking at her. “You and the rest, you’re the ones who don’t know.”

 

A voice came out of the intercom, warm and pleased and cheerful. “Very good, Lloyd, thanks. Send her in, please.”

 

“Alone?”

 

“Yes indeed.” There was an indulgent chuckle as the intercom cut off. Dayna felt her mouth dry up at the sound of it.

 

Lloyd turned around. A lot of sweat now, standing out on his forehead in large drops and running down his thin cheeks like tears. “You heard him. Go on.”

 

She folded her arms below her breasts, keeping the knife turned inward. “Suppose I decline.”

 

“I’ll drag you in.”

 

“Look at you, Lloyd. You’re so scared you couldn’t drag a mongrel puppy in there.” She looked at the others. “You’re all scared. Jenny, you’re practically making in your pants. Not good for your complexion, dear. Or your pants.”

 

“Stop it, you filthy sneak,” Jenny whispered.

 

“I was never scared like that in the Free Zone,” Dayna said. “I felt good over there. I came over here because I wanted that good feeling to stay on. It was nothing more political than that. You ought to think it over. Maybe he sells fear because he’s got nothing else to sell.”

 

“Ma’am,” Whitney said apologetically, “I’d sure like to listen to the rest of your sermon, but the man is waiting. I’m sorry, but you either got to say amen and go through that door on your own or I’ll drag you. You can tell your tale to him once you get in there… if you can find enough spit to talk with, that is. But until then, you’re our responsibility.” And the odd thing is, she thought, he sounds genuinely sorry. Too bad he’s also so genuinely scared.

 

“You won’t have to do that.”

 

She forced her feet to get started, and then it was a little easier. She was going to her death; she was quite sure of that. If so, let it be so. She had the knife. For him first, if she could, and then for herself, if necessary.

 

She thought: My name is Dayna Roberta Jurgens, and I am afraid, but I have been afraid before. All he can take from me is what I would have to give up someday anyhow—my life. I will not let him break me down. I will not let him make me less than I am, if I can possibly help it. I want to die well… and I am going to have what I want.

 

She turned the knob and stepped through into the inner office… and into the presence of Randall Flagg.

---

 

Bellowing his rage, Flagg kicked her. The yielding, indifferent movement of her body enraged him further. He began to kick her around the room, bellowing, snarling. Sparks began to jump from his hair, as if somewhere inside him a cyclotron had hummed into life, building up an electrical field and turning him into a battery. His eyes blazed with dark fire. He bellowed and kicked, kicked and bellowed.

 

Outside, Lloyd and the others grew pale. They looked at each other. At last it was more than they could stand. Jenny, Ken, Whitney—they drifted away, and their curdled-milk faces were set in the careful expressions of people who hear nothing and want to go right on hearing it.

 

Only Lloyd waited—not because he wanted to, but because he knew it was expected of him. And at last Flagg called him in.

 

He was sitting on the wide desk, his legs crossed, his hands on the knees of his jeans. He was looking over Lloyd’s head, out into space. There was a draft, and Lloyd saw that the window-wall was smashed in the middle. The jagged edges of the hole were sticky with blood.

 

Resting on the floor was a huddled, vaguely human form wrapped in a drape.

 

“Get rid of that,” Flagg said.

 

“Okay.” His voice fell to a husky whisper. “Should I take the head?”

 

“Take the whole thing out to the east of town and douse it in gasoline and burn it. Do you hear me? Burn it! You burn the fucking thing! ”

 

“All right.”

 

“Yes.” Flagg smiled benignly.

 

Trembling, cotton-mouthed, nearly groaning with terror, Lloyd struggled to pick up the bulky object. The underside was sticky. It made a U in his arms, slithered through them, and thumped back to the floor. He threw a terrified glance at Flagg, but he was still in a semi-lotus, looking outward. Lloyd got hold of it again, clutched it, and staggered toward the door.

 

“Lloyd?”

 

He stopped and looked back. A little moan escaped him. Flagg was still in the semi-lotus, but now he was floating about ten inches above the desk, still looking serenely across the room.

 

“W-W-What?”

 

“Do you still have the key I gave you in Phoenix?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Keep it handy. The time is coming.”

 

“A-All right.”

 

He waited, but Flagg did not speak again. He hung in the darkness, a mind-boggling Hindu fakir’s trick, looking outward, smiling gently.

 

Lloyd left quickly, happy as always just to go with his life and his sanity.

 

That day was a quiet one in Vegas. Lloyd arrived back around 2 P.M., smelling of gasoline. The wind had started to rise, and by five o’clock it was howling up and down the Strip and making forlorn hooting noises between the hotels. The palms, which had begun to die without city water in July and August, flapped against the sky like tattered battle flags. Clouds in strange shapes scudded overhead.

 

In the Cub Bar, Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott sat drinking bottled beer and eating egg salad sandwiches. Three old ladies—the Weird Sisters, everyone called them—kept chickens on the outskirts of town, and no one could seem to get enough eggs. Below Whitney and Ken, in the casino, little Dinny McCarthy was crawling happily around on one of the crap tables with an array of plastic soldiers.

 

“Lookit that little squirt,” Ken said fondly. “Someone ast me if I’d watch him an hour. I’d watch him all week. I wish to God he was mine. My wife only had the one, and he was two months premature. Died in the incubator the third day out.” He looked up as Lloyd came in.

 

“Hey, Dinny!” Lloyd called.

 

“Yoyd! Yoyd!” Dinny cried. He ran to the edge of the crap table, jumped down, and ran to him. Lloyd picked him up, swung him, and hugged him hard.

 

“Got kisses for Lloyd?” he asked.

 

Dinny smacked him with noisy kisses.

 

“I got something for you,” Lloyd said, and took a handful of foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses from his breast pocket.

 

Dinny crowed with delight and clutched them. “Yoyd?”

 

“What, Dinny?”

 

“Why do you smell like a gasoline pile?”

 

Lloyd smiled. “I was burning some trash, honey. You go on and play. Who’s your mom now?”

 

“Angelina.” He pronounced it Angeyeena. “Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too.”

 

“Don’t tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd.”

 

Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd. In a minute or two he was back on the DON’T COME line of the crap table, generating his army with his mouth crammed full of chocolate. Whitney came over, wearing his white apron. He had two sandwiches for Lloyd and a cold bottle of Hamm’s.

 

“Thanks,” Lloyd said. “Looks great.”

 

“That’s homemade Syrian bread,” Whitney said proudly.

 

Lloyd munched for a while. “Has anybody seen him?” he asked at last.

 

Ken shook his head. “I think he’s gone again.”

 

Lloyd thought it over. Outside, a stronger-than-average gust of wind shrieked by, sounding lonely and lost in the desert. Dinny raised his head uneasily for a moment and then bent back to play.

 

“I think he’s around somewhere,” Lloyd said finally. “I don’t know why, but I do. I think he’s around waiting for something to happen. I dunno what.”

 

Whitney said in a low voice, “You think he got it out of her?”

 

“No,” Lloyd said, watching Dinny. “I don’t think he did. It went wrong for him somehow. She… she got lucky or she outthought him. And that doesn’t happen often.”

 

“It won’t matter in the long run,” Ken said, but he looked troubled just the same.

 

“No, it won’t.” Lloyd listened to the wind for a while. “Maybe he’s gone back to L.A.” But he didn’t really think so, and his face showed it.

 

Whitney went back to the kitchen and produced another round of beer. They drank in silence, thinking disquieting thoughts. First the Judge, now the woman. Both dead. And neither had talked. Neither had been unmarked as he had ordered. It was as if the old Yankees of Mantle and Maris and Ford had lost the opening two games of the World Series; it was hard for them to believe, and frightening.

 

The wind blew hard all night.
 

Chapter 66

 

At about the same time that Nadine Cross was beginning to realize certain truths which should perhaps have been self-evident, Lloyd Henreid was sitting alone in the Cub Bar, playing Big Clock solitaire and cheating. He was out of temper. There had been a flash fire at Indian Springs that day, one dead, three hurt, and one of those likely to die of bad flash burns. They had no one in Vegas who knew how to treat such burns.

 

Carl Hough had brought the news. He had been pissed off to a high extreme, and he was not a man to be taken lightly. He had been a pilot for Ozark Airlines before the plague, was an ex-Marine, and could have broken Lloyd in two pieces with one hand while making a daiquiri with the other if he had wanted to. According to Carl, he had killed several men during the course of his long and checkered career, and Lloyd tended to believe him. Not that Lloyd was physically afraid of Carl Hough; the pilot was big and tough, but he was as leery of the Walkin Dude as anyone else in the West, and Lloyd wore Flagg’s charm. But he was one of their fliers, and because he was, he had to be handled diplomatically. And oddly enough, Lloyd was something, of a diplomat. His credentials were simple but awesome: He had spent several weeks with a certain madman named Poke Freeman and had lived to tell the tale. He had also spent several months with Randall Flagg, and was still drawing air and in his right mind.

 

Carl had come in around two on September 12, his cycle helmet under one arm. There was an ugly burn on his left cheek and blisters on one hand. There had been a fire. Bad, but not as bad as it could have been. A fuel truck had exploded, spewing burning petroleum all over the tarmac area.

 

“All right,” Lloyd had said. “I’ll see that the big guy knows. The guys that got hurt are at the infirmary?”

 

“Yeah. They are. I don’t think Freddy Campanari is going to live to see the sun go down. That leaves two pilots, me and Andy. Tell him that, and tell him something else when he gets back. I want that fuck Trashcan Man gone. That’s my price for staying.”

 

Lloyd gazed at Carl Hough. “Is it?”

 

“You’re damn well told.”

 

“Well, I tell you, Carl,” Lloyd said. “I can’t pass that message on. If you want to give orders to him, you’ll have to do it yourself.”

 

Carl looked suddenly confused and a little afraid. Fear sat strangely on that craggy face. “Yeah, I see your point. I’m just tired and fucked over, Lloyd. My face hurts like hell. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”

 

“That’s okay, man. It’s what I’m here for.” Sometimes he wished it wasn’t. Already his head was starting to ache.

 

Carl said, “But he’s gotta go. If I have to tell him that, I will. I know he’s got one of those black stones. He’s ace-high with the tall man, I guess. But, hey, listen.” Carl sat down and put his helmet on a baccarat table. “Trash was responsible for that fire. My Christ, how’re we ever going to get those planes up if one of the big guy’s men is torching the fucking pilots?”

 

Several people passing through the lobby of the Grand glanced uneasily over at the table where Lloyd and Carl sat.

 

“Keep your voice down, Carl.”

 

“Okay. But you see the problem, don’t you?”

 

“How sure are you that Trash did it?”

 

“Listen,” Carl said, leaning forward, “he was in the motor pool, all right? In there for a long time. Lots of guys saw him, not just me.”

 

“I thought he was out someplace. In the desert. You know, looking for stuff.”

 

“Well, he came back, all right? That sand-crawler he takes out was full of stuff. God knows where he gets it, I sure don’t. Well, he had the guys in stitches at coffee break. You know how he is. To him, weaponry is like candy is to a kid.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“The last thing he showed us was one of those incendiary fuses. You pull the tab, and there’s this little burst of phosphorus. Then nothing for half an hour or forty minutes, depending on the size of the fuse, all right? You get it? Then there’s one hell of a fire. Small, but very intense.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“So okay. Trashy’s showin us, just about droolin over the thing, in fact, and Freddy Campanari says, ‘Hey, people who play with fire wet the bed, Trash.’ And Steve Tobin—you know him, he’s funny like a rubber crutch—he says, ‘You guys better put away your matches, Trashy’s back in town.’ And Trash got really weird. He looked around at us, and he muttered under his breath. I was sitting right next to him and it sounded like he said, ‘Don’t ask me about old lady Semple’s check no more.’ That make any sense to you?”

 

Lloyd shook his head. Nothing about the Trashcan Man made much sense to him.

 

“Then he just left. Picked up the stuff he was showing us and took off. Well, none of us felt very good about it. We didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. Most of the guys really like Trash. Or they did. He’s like a little kid, you know?”

 

Lloyd nodded.

 

“An hour later, that goddam fuel truck goes up like a rocket. And while we were picking up the pieces, I happened to look up and there’s Trashy over in his sand-crawler by the barracks building, watching us with binoculars.”

 

“Is that all you’ve got?” Lloyd asked, relieved.

 

“No. It ain’t. If it was, I wouldn’t even have bothered to come see you, Lloyd. But it got me thinking about how that truck went up. That’s just the sort of thing you use an incendiary fuse for. In Nam, the Cong blew up a lot of our ammo dumps just that way, with our own fucking incendiary fuses. Stick it under the truck, on the exhaust pipe. If no one starts the truck up, it goes when the timer runs out. If someone does, it goes when the pipe gets hot. Either way, ka-boom, no more truck. The only thing that didn’t fit was there’s always a dozen fuel trucks in the motor pool, and we don’t use them in any particular order. So after we got poor old Freddy over to the infirmary, John Waite and I went over there. John’s in charge of the motor pool and he was just about pissing himself. He’d seen Trash in there earlier.”

 

“He was sure it was Trashcan Man?”

 

“With those burns all the way up his arm, it’s kind of hard to make a mistake, wouldn’t you say? All right? No one thought anything of it then. He was just poking around, and that’s his job, ain’t it?”

 

“Yes, I guess you’d have to say it is.”

 

“So me and John start to look over the rest of the fuel trucks. And holy shit, there’s an incendiary fuse on every one of them. He put them on the exhaust pipes just below the fuel-tanks themselves. The reason the truck we were using went first was because the exhaust pipe got hot, like I just told you, all right? But the others were getting ready to go. Two or three were starting to smoke. Some of the trucks were empty, but at least five of them were full of jet fuel. Another ten minutes and we would have lost half the goddam base.”

 

Oh Jesus, Lloyd thought mournfully. It really is bad. Just about as bad as it can get.

 

Carl held up his blistered hand. “I got this pulling one of the hot ones. Now do you see why he’s got to go?”

 

Lloyd said hesitantly, “Maybe someone stole those fuses out of the back of his sand-crawler while he was taking a leak or something.”

 

Carl said patiently: “That’s not how it happened. Someone hurt his feelings while he was showing off his toys, and he tried to burn us all up. He damn near succeeded. Something’s got to be done, Lloyd.”

 

“All right, Carl.”

 

He spent the rest of the afternoon asking around about Trash—had anyone seen him or know where he might be? Guarded looks and negative answers. Word had gotten around. Maybe that was good. Anyone who did see him would be quick to report it, in hopes of having a good word put in on their behalf with the big guy. But Lloyd had a hunch that no one was going to see Trash. He had given them a little hotfoot and had gone running back into the desert in his sand-crawler.

 

He looked down at the solitaire game spread out in front of him and carefully controlled an urge to sweep the whole thing onto the floor. Instead, he cheated out another ace and went on playing. It didn’t matter. When Flagg wanted him, he would just reach out and gather him up. Old Trashy was going to end up riding a crosspiece just like Hec Drogan. Hard luck, guy.

 

But in his secret heart, he wondered.

 

Things had happened lately that he didn’t like. Dayna, for instance. Flagg had known about her, that was true, but she hadn’t talked. She had somehow escaped into death instead, leaving them no further ahead in the matter of the third spy.

 

That was another thing. How come Flagg didn’t just know about the third spy? He had known about the old fart, and when he had come back from the desert he had known about Dayna, and had told them exactly how he was going to handle her. But it hadn’t worked.

 

And now, Trashcan Man.

 

Trash wasn’t a nobody. Maybe he had been back in the old days, but not anymore. He wore the black man’s stone just as he himself did. After Flagg had crisped that bigmouth lawyer’s brains in L.A., Lloyd had seen Flagg lay his hands on Trashcan’s shoulders and tell him gently that all the dreams had been true dreams. And Trash had whispered, “My life for you.”

 

Lloyd didn’t know what else might have passed between them, but it seemed clear that he had wandered the desert with Flagg’s blessing. And now Trashcan Man had gone berserk.

 

Which raised some pretty serious questions.

 

Which was why Lloyd was sitting here alone at nine in the evening, cheating at solitaire and wishing he was drunk.

 

“Mr. Henreid?”

 

Now what? He looked up and saw a girl with a pretty, pouty face. Tight white shorts. A halter that didn’t quite cover the areolae of her nipples. Sexpot type for sure, but she looked nervous and pale, almost ill. She was biting compulsively at one of her thumbnails, and he saw that all her nails were bitten and ragged.

 

“What.”

 

“I… I have to see Mr. Flagg,” she said. The strength went rapidly out of her voice, and it ended as a whisper.

 

“You do, huh? What do you think I am, his social secretary?”

 

“But… they said… to see you.”

 

“Who did?”

 

“Well, Angie Hirschfield did. It was her.”

 

“What’s your name?”

 

“Uh, Julie.” She giggled, but it was only a reflex. The scared look never left her face, and Lloyd wondered wearily what sort of shit was up in the fan now. A girl like this wouldn’t ask for Flagg unless it was very serious indeed. “Julie Lawry.”

 

“Well, Julie Lawry, Flagg isn’t in Las Vegas now.”

 

“When will he be back?”

 

“I don’t know. He comes and goes, and he doesn’t wear a beeper. He doesn’t explain himself to me, either. If you have something, give it to me and I’ll see that he gets the message.” She looked at him doubtfully and Lloyd repeated what he had told Carl Hough that afternoon. “It’s what I’m here for, Julie.”

 

“Okay.” Then, in a rush: “If it’s important, you tell him I’m the one told you. Julie Lawry.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“You won’t forget?”

 

“No, for Chrissake! Now what is it?”

 

She pouted. “Well, you don’t have to be so mean about it.”

 

He sighed and put the handful of cards he had been holding down on the table. “No,” he said. “I guess I don’t. Now, what is it?”

 

“That dummy. If he’s around, I figure he’s spying. I just thought you should know.” Her eyes glinted viciously. “Motherfucker pulled a gun on me.”

 

“What dummy?”

 

“Well, I saw the retard, and so I figured the dummy must be with him, you know? And they’re just not our type. I figure they must have come from the other side.”

 

“That’s what you figure, huh?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Well, I don’t know what the Christ you’re talking about. It’s been a long day and I’m tired. If you don’t start talking some sense, Julie, I’m going up to bed.”

 

Julie sat down, crossed her legs, and told Lloyd about her meeting with Nick Andros and Tom Cullen in Pratt, Kansas, her hometown. About the Pepto-Bismol (“I was just having a little fun with the softie, and this deaf-and-dumb pulls a gun on me!”). She even told him about shooting at them as they left town.

 

“Which all proves what?” Lloyd asked when she finished. He had been a little intrigued with the word “spy,” but since then had lapsed into a semidaze of boredom.

 

Julie pouted again and lit a cigarette. “I told you. That feeb, he’s over here now. I just bet he’s spying.”

 

“Tom Cullen, you said his name was?”

 

“Yes.”

 

He had the vaguest sort of memory. Cullen was a big blond guy, a few cards short the deck for sure, but surely not as bad as this high-iron bitch was making out. He tried for more and came up empty. People were still streaming into Vegas in numbers of sixty to a hundred a day. It was becoming impossible to keep them all straight, and Flagg said the immigration was going to get a lot heavier before it tapered off. He supposed he could go to Paul Burlson, who was keeping a file of Vegas residents and find something out about this Cullen dude.

 

“Are you going to arrest him?” Julie asked.

 

Lloyd looked at her. “I’ll arrest you if you don’t get off my case,” he said.

 

“Nice fucking guy!” Julie Lawry cried, her voice rising shrewishly. She jumped to her feet, glaring at him. In her tight white cotton shorts, her legs seemed to go all the way up to her chin. “Try to do you a favor!”

 

“I’ll check it.”

 

“Yeah, right, I know that story.”

 

She stomped off, fanny swinging in tight little circles of indignation.

 

Lloyd watched her with a certain weary amusement, thinking there were a lot of chicks like her in the world—even now, after the superflu, he was willing to bet there were a lot around. Easy to slap the make on, but watch out for the fingernails afterward. Kissing cousins to those spiders that gobble up their mates after sex. Two months had gone by and she still bore that mute guy a grudge. What did she say his name was? Andros?

 

Lloyd pulled a battered black notebook from his back pocket, wet his finger, and paged over to a blank sheet. This was his memory book, and it was chock-full of little notes to himself—everything from a reminder to take a shave before meeting with Flagg to a boxed memorandum to get the contents of Las Vegas’ pharmacies inventoried before they started to lose morphine and codeine. It would be time to get another little book soon.

 

In his flat and scrawling grammar school script he wrote: Nick Andros or maybe Androtes—mute. In town? And below that: Tom Cullen, check out with Paul. He tucked the book back into his pocket. Forty miles northeast, the dark man had consummated his long-term relationship with Nadine Cross under the glittering desert stars. He would have been very interested to know that a friend of Nick Andros’s was in Las Vegas.

 

But he slept.

 

Lloyd looked morosely down at his solitaire game, forgetting about Julie Lawry and her grudge and her tight little ass. He cheated out another ace, and his thoughts turned dolefully back to the Trashcan Man and what Flagg might say—or do—when Lloyd told him.

 
---
 

The Walkin Dude was back in Vegas.

 

He had gotten in around nine-thirty in the morning. Lloyd had seen him arrive. Flagg had also seen Lloyd, but had taken no notice of him. He had been crossing the lobby of the Grand, leading a woman. Heads turned to look at her in spite of everyone’s nearly unanimous aversion to looking at the dark man. Her hair was a uniform snow-white. She had a terrible sunburn, one so bad that it made Lloyd think of the victims of the gasoline fire at Indian Springs. White hair, horrible sunburn, utterly empty eyes. They looked out at the world with a lack of expression that was beyond placidity, even beyond idiocy. Lloyd had seen eyes like that once before. In Los Angeles, after the dark man had finished with Eric Strellerton, the lawyer who was going to tell Flagg how to run everything.

 

Flagg looked at no one. He grinned. He led the woman to the elevator and inside. The doors slid shut behind them and they went up to the top floor.

 

For the next six hours Lloyd was busy trying to get everything organized, so when Flagg called him and asked for a report, he would be ready. He thought everything was under control. The only item left was tracking down Paul Burlson and getting whatever he had on this Tom Cullen, just in case Julie Lawry really had stumbled onto something. Lloyd didn’t think it likely, but with Flagg it was better to be safe than sorry. Much better.

 

He picked up the telephone and waited patiently. After a few moments there was a click and then Shirley Dunbar’s Tennessee twang was in his ear: “Operator.”

 

“Hi, Shirley, it’s Lloyd.”

 

“Lloyd Henreid! How are ya?”

 

“Not too bad, Shirl. Can you try 6214 for me?”

 

“Paul? He’s not home. He’s out at Indian Springs. Bet I could catch him for you at BaseOps.”

 

“Okay, try that.”

 

“You bet. Say, Lloyd, when you gonna come over and try some of my coffee cake? I bake fresh every two, three days.”

 

“Soon, Shirley,” Lloyd said, grimacing. Shirley was forty, ran about one-eighty… and had set her cap for Lloyd. He took a lot of ribbing about her, especially from Whitney and Ronnie Sykes. But she was a fine telephone operator, able to do wonders with the Las Vegas phone system. Getting the phones working—the most important ones, anyway—had been their first priority after the power, but most of the automatic switching equipment had burned out, and so they were back to the equivalent of tin cans and lots of waxed string. There were also constant outages. Shirley handled what there was to handle with uncanny skill, and she was patient with the three or four other operators, who were still learning.

 

Also, she did make nice coffee cake.

 

“Real soon,” he added, and thought of how nice it would be if Julie Lawry’s firm, rounded body could be grafted onto Shirley Dunbar’s skills and gentle, uncomplaining nature.

 

She seemed satisfied. There were beeps and boops on the line, and one high-pitched, echoing whine that made him hold the handset away from his ear, grimacing. Then the phone rang at the other end in a series of hoarse burrs.

 

“Bailey, Ops,” a voice made tinny by distance said.

 

“This is Lloyd,” he bellowed into the phone. “Is Paul there?”

 

“Haul what, Lloyd?” Bailey asked.

 

“Paul! Paul Burlson! ”

 

“Oh, him! Yeah, he’s right here having a Co-Cola.”

 

There was a pause—Lloyd began to think that the tenuous connection had been broken—and then Paul came on.

 

“We’re going to have to shout, Paul. The connection stinks.” Lloyd wasn’t completely sure that Paul Burlson had the lung capacity to shout. He was a scrawny little man with thick lenses in his glasses, and some men called him Mr. Cool because he insisted on wearing a complete three-piece suit each day despite the dry crunch of the Vegas heat. But he was a good man to have as your information officer, and Flagg had told Lloyd in one of his expansive moods that by 1991 Burlson would be in charge of the secret police. And he’ll be sooo good at it, Flagg had added with a warm and loving smile.

 

Paul did manage to speak a little louder.

 

“Have you got your directory with you?” Lloyd asked.

 

“Yes. Stan Bailey and I were going over a work rotation program.”

 

“See if you’ve got anything on a guy named Tom Cullen, would you?”

 

“Just a second.” A second stretched out to two or three minutes, and Lloyd began to wonder again if they had been cut off. Then Paul said, “Okay, Tom Cullen… you there, Lloyd?”

 

“Right here.”

 

“You can never be sure, with the phones the way they are. He’s somewhere between twenty-two and thirty-five at a guess. He doesn’t know for sure. Light mental retardation. He has some work skills. We’ve had him on the clean-up crew.”

 

“How long has he been in Vegas?”

 

“Something less than three weeks.”

 

“From Colorado?”

 

“Yes, but we have a dozen people over here who tried it over there and decided they didn’t like it. They drove this guy out. He was having sex with a normal woman and I guess they were afraid for their gene pool.” Paul laughed.

 

“Got his address?”

 

Paul gave it to him and Lloyd jotted it down in his notebook.

 

“That it, Lloyd?”

 

“One other name, if you’ve got the time.”

 

Paul laughed—a small man’s fussy laugh. “Sure, it’s only my coffee break.”

 

“The name is Nick Andros.”

 

Paul said instantly: “I have that name on my red list.”

 

“Oh?” Lloyd thought as quickly as he could, which was far from the speed of light. He had no idea what Paul’s “red list” might be. “Who gave you his name?”

 

Exasperated, Paul said: “Who do you think? The same person that gave me all the red list names.”

 

“Oh. Okay.” He said goodbye and hung up. Small-talk was impossible with the bad connection, and Lloyd had too much to think about to want to make it, anyway.

 

Red list.

 

Names that Flagg had given to Paul and to no one else, apparently—although Paul had assumed Lloyd knew all about it. Red list, what did that mean? Red meant stop.

 

Red meant danger.

 

Lloyd lifted the telephone again.

 

“Operator.”

 

“Lloyd again, Shirl.”

 

“Well, Lloyd, did you—”

 

“Shirley, I can’t gab. I’m onto something that’s maybe big.”

 

“Okay, Lloyd.” Shirley’s voice lost its flirtiness and she was suddenly all business.

 

“Who’s catching at Security?”

 

“Barry Dorgan.”

 

“Get him for me. And I never called you.”

 

“Yes, Lloyd.” She sounded afraid now. Lloyd was afraid, too, but he was also excited.

 

A moment later Dorgan was on. He was a good man, for which Lloyd was profoundly grateful. Too many men of the Poke Freeman type had gravitated toward the police department.

 

“I want you to pick someone up for me,” Lloyd said. “Get him alive. I have to have him alive even if it means you lose men. His name is Tom Cullen and you can probably catch him at home. Bring him to the Grand.” He gave Barry Tom’s address and then made him repeat it back.

 

“How important is this, Lloyd?”

 

“Very important. You do this right, and someone bigger than me is going to be very happy with you.”

 

“Okay.” Barry hung up and Lloyd did too, confident that Barry understood the converse: Fuck it up and somebody is going to be very angry with you.

 

Barry called back an hour later to say he was fairly sure Tom Cullen had split.

 

“But he’s feeble,” Barry went on, “and he can’t drive. Not even a motor-scooter. If he’s going east, he can’t be any further than Dry Lake. We can catch him, Lloyd, I know we can. Give me a green light.” Barry was fairly drooling. He was one of four or five people in Vegas who knew about the spies, and he had read Lloyd’s thoughts.

 

“Let me think this over,” Lloyd said, and hung up before Barry could protest. He had gotten better at thinking things over than he would have believed possible in the pre-flu days, but he knew this was too big for him. And that red list business troubled him. Why hadn’t he been told about that?

 

For the first time since meeting Flagg in Phoenix, Lloyd had the disquieting feeling that his position might be vulnerable. Secrets had been kept. They could probably still get Cullen; both Carl Hough and Bill Jamieson could fly the army choppers that were hangared out at the Springs, and if they had to they could close every road going out of Nevada to the east. Also, the guy wasn’t Jack the Ripper or Dr. Octopus; he was a feeb on the run. But Christ! If he had known about this Andros what’s-his-face when Julie Lawry had come to see him, they might have been able to take him right in his little North Vegas apartment.

 

Somewhere inside him a door had opened, letting in a cool breeze of fear. Flagg had screwed up. And Flagg was capable of distrusting Lloyd Henreid. And that was baaaad shit.

 

Still, he would have to be told about this. He wasn’t going to take the decision to start another manhunt upon himself. Not after what had happened with the Judge. He got up to go to the house phones, and met Whitney Horgan coming from them.

 

“It’s the man, Lloyd,” he said. “He wants you.”

 

“All right,” he said, surprised by how calm his voice was—the fear inside him was now very great. And above all else, it was important for him to remember that he would have long since starved in his Phoenix holding cell if it hadn’t been for Flagg. There was no sense kidding himself; he belonged to the dark man lock, stock, and barrel.

 

But I can’t do my job if he shuts off the information, he thought, going to the elevator bank. He pushed the penthouse button, and the elevator car rose swiftly. Again there was that nagging, unhappy feeling: Flagg hadn’t known. The third spy had been here all along, and Flagg hadn’t known.

 

“Come in, Lloyd.” Flagg’s lazy smiling face above a prosy blue-checked bathrobe.

 

Lloyd came in. The air conditioning was on high, and it was like stepping into an open-air suite in Greenland. And still, as Lloyd stepped past the dark man, he could feel the radiating body heat he gave off. It was like being in a room which contained a small but very powerful furnace.

 

Sitting in the corner, in a white sling chair, was the woman who had come in with Flagg that morning. Her hair was carefully pinned up, and she wore a shift dress. Her face was blank and moony, and looking at her gave Lloyd a deep chill. As teenagers, he and some friends had once stolen some dynamite from a construction project, had fused it and thrown it into Lake Harrison, where it exploded. The dead fish that had floated to the surface afterward had had that same look of awful blank impartiality in their moon-rimmed eyes.

 

“I’d like you to meet Nadine Cross,” Flagg said softly from behind him, making Lloyd jump. “My wife.”

 

Startled, Lloyd looked at Flagg and met only that mocking grin, those dancing eyes.

 

“My dear, Lloyd Henreid, my righthand man. Lloyd and I met in Phoenix, where Lloyd was being detained and was consequently about to dine on a fellow detainee. In fact, Lloyd might already have partaken of the appetizer. Correct, Lloyd?”

 

Lloyd blushed dully and said nothing, although the woman was either gonzo or stoned right over the moon.

 

“Put out your hand, dear,” the dark man said.

 

Like a robot, Nadine put her hand out. Her eyes continued to stare indifferently at a point somewhere above Lloyd’s shoulder.

 

Jesus, this is creepy, Lloyd thought. A light sweat had sprung out all over his body in spite of the frigid air conditioning.

 

“Pleestameetcha,” he said, and shook the soft warm meat of her hand. Afterward, he had to restrain a powerful urge to wipe his hand on the leg of his pants. Nadine’s hand continued to hang laxly in the air.

 

“You can put your hand down now, my love,” Flagg said.

 

Nadine put her hand back in her lap, where it began to twist and squirm. Lloyd realized with something like horror that she was masturbating.

 

“My wife is indisposed,” Flagg said, and tittered. “She is also in a family way, as the saying is. Congratulate me, Lloyd. I am going to be a papa.” That titter again; the sound of scampering, light-footed rats behind an old wall.

 

“Congratulations,” Lloyd said through lips that felt blue and numb.

 

“We can talk our little hearts out around Nadine, can’t we, dear? She’s as silent as the grave. To make a small pun, mum’s the word.”

 

“What about Indian Springs?”

 

Lloyd blinked and tried to shift his mental gears, feeling naked and on the defensive. “It’s going good,” he managed at last.

 

“ ‘Going good’?” The dark man leaned toward him and for one moment Lloyd was sure he was going to open his mouth and bite his head off like a Tootsie Pop. He recoiled. “That’s hardly what I’d call a close analysis, Lloyd.”

 

“There are some other things—”

 

“When I want to talk about other things, I’ll ask about other things.” Flagg’s voice was rising, getting uncomfortably close to a scream. Lloyd had never seen such a radical shift in temperament, and it scared him badly. “Right now I want a status report on Indian Springs and you better have it for me, Lloyd, for your sake you better have it!”

 

“All right,” Lloyd muttered. “Okay.” He fumbled his notebook out of his hip pocket, and for the next half hour they talked about Indian Springs, the National Guard jets, and the Shrike missiles. Flagg began to relax again—although it was hard to tell, and it was a very bad idea to take anything at all for granted when you were dealing with the Walkin Dude.

 

“Do you think they could overfly Boulder in two weeks?” he asked. “Say… by the first of October?”

 

“Carl could, I guess,” Lloyd said doubtfully. “I don’t know about the other two.”

 

“I want them ready,” Flagg muttered. He got up and began to pace around the room. “I want those people hiding in holes by next spring. I want to hit them at night, while they’re sleeping. Rake that town from one end to the other. I want it to be like Hamburg and Dresden in World War II.” He turned to Lloyd and his face was parchment white, the dark eyes blazing out of it with their own crazy fire. His grin was like a scimitar. “Teach them to send spies. They’ll be living in caves when spring comes. Then we’ll go over there and have us a pig hunt. Teach them to send spies.”

 

Lloyd found his tongue at last. “The third spy—”

 

“We’ll find him, Lloyd. Don’t worry about that. We’ll get the bastard.” The smile was back, darkly charming. But Lloyd had seen an instant of angry and bewildered fear before that smile reappeared. And fear was the one expression he had never expected to see there.

 

“We know who he is, I think,” Lloyd said quietly.

 

Flagg had been turning a jade figurine over in his hands, examining it. Now his hand froze. He became very still, and a peculiar expression of concentration stole over his face. For the first time the Cross woman’s gaze shifted, first toward Flagg and then hastily away. The air in the penthouse suite seemed to thicken.

 

“What? What did you say?”

 

“The third spy—”

 

“No,” Flagg said with sudden decision. “No. You’re jumping at shadows, Lloyd.”

 

“If I’ve got it right, he’s a friend of a guy named Nick Andros.”

 

The jade figurine fell through Flagg’s fingers and shattered. A moment later Lloyd was lifted out of his chair by the front of his shirt. Flagg had moved across the room so swiftly that Lloyd had not even seen him. And then Flagg’s face was plastered against his, that awful sick heat was baking into him, and Flagg’s black weasel eyes were only an inch from his own.

 

Flagg screamed: “And you sat there and talked about Indian Springs? I ought to throw you out that window! ”

 

Something—perhaps it was seeing the dark man vulnerable, perhaps it was only the knowledge that Flagg wouldn’t kill him until he got all of the information—allowed Lloyd to find his tongue and speak in his own defense.

 

“I tried to tell you!” he cried. “You cut me off! And you cut me off from the red list, whatever that is! If I’d known about that, I could have had that fucking retard last night!”

 

Then he was flung across the room to crash into the far wall. Stars exploded in his head and he dropped to the parquet floor, dazed. He shook his head, trying to clear it. There was a high humming noise in his ears.

 

Flagg seemed to have gone crazy. He was striding jerkily around the room, his face blank with rage. Nadine had shrunk back into her chair. Flagg reached a knickknack shelf populated with a milky-green menagerie of jade animals. He stared at them for a second, seeming almost puzzled by them, and then swept them all off onto the floor. They shattered like tiny grenades. He kicked at the bigger pieces with one bare foot, sending them flying. His dark hair had fallen over his forehead. He flipped it back with a jerk of his head and then turned toward Lloyd. There was a grotesque expression of sympathy and compassion on his face—both emotions every bit as real as a three-dollar bill, Lloyd thought. He walked over to help Lloyd up, and Lloyd noticed that he stepped on several jagged pieces of broken jade with no sign of pain… and no blood.

 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Let’s have a drink.” He offered a hand and helped Lloyd to his feet. Like a kid doing a temper tantrum, Lloyd thought. “Yours is bourbon straight up, isn’t it?”

 

“Fine.”

 

Flagg went to the bar and made monstrous drinks. Lloyd demolished half of his at a gulp. The glass chattered briefly on the end table as he set it down. But he felt a little better.

 

Flagg said, “The red list is something I didn’t think you’d ever have to use. There were eight names on it—five now. It was their governing council plus the old woman. Andros was one of them. But he’s dead now. Yes, Andros is dead, I’m sure of it.” He fixed Lloyd with a narrow, baleful stare.

 

Lloyd told the story, referring to his notebook from time to time. He didn’t really need it, but it was good, from time to time, to get away from that smoking glare. He began with Julie Lawry and ended with Barry Dorgan.

 

“You say he’s retarded,” Flagg mused.

 

“Yes.”

 

Happiness spread over Flagg’s face and he began to nod. “Yes,” he said, but not to Lloyd. “Yes, that’s why I couldn’t see—”

 

He broke off and went to the telephone. Moments later he was talking to Barry.

 

“The helicopters. You get Carl in one and Bill Jamieson in the other. Continuous radio contact. Send out sixty—no, a hundred men. Close every road going out of eastern and southern Nevada. See that they have this Cullen’s description. And I want hourly reports.”

 

He hung up and rubbed his hands happily. “We’ll get him. I only wish we could send his head back to his bum-buddy Andros. But Andros is dead. Isn’t he, Nadine?”

 

Nadine only stared blankly.

 

“The helicopters won’t be much good tonight,” Lloyd said. “It’ll be dark in three hours.”

 

“Don’t you fret, old Lloyd,” the dark man said cheerfully. “Tomorrow will be time enough for the helicopters. He isn’t far. No, not far at all.”

 

Lloyd was bending his spiral notebook nervously back and forth in his hands, wishing he was anywhere but here. Flagg was in a good mood now, but Lloyd didn’t think he would be after hearing about Trash.

 

“I have one other item,” he said reluctantly. “It’s about the Trashcan Man.” He wondered if this was going to trigger another tantrum like the jade-smashing outburst.

 

“Dear Trashy. Is he off on one of his prospecting trips?”

 

“I don’t know where he is. He pulled a little trick at Indian Springs before he went out again.” He related the story as Carl had told it the day before. Flagg’s face darkened when he heard that Freddy Campanari had been mortally wounded, but by the time Lloyd had finished, his face was serene again. Instead of bursting into a rage, Flagg only waved his hand impatiently.

 

“All right. When he comes back in, I want him killed. But quickly and mercifully. I don’t want him to suffer. I had hoped he might… last longer. You probably don’t understand this, Lloyd, but I felt a certain… kinship with that boy. I thought I might be able to use him—and I have—but I was never completely sure. Even a master sculptor can find that the knife has turned in his hand, if it’s a defective knife. Correct, Lloyd?”

 

Lloyd, who knew from nothing about sculpture and sculptors’ knives (he thought they used mallets and chisels), nodded agreeably. “Sure.”

 

“And he’s done us the great service of arming the Shrikes. It was him, wasn’t it!”

 

“Yes. It was.”

 

“He’ll be back. Tell Barry Trash is to be… put out of his misery. Painlessly, if possible. Right now I am more concerned with the retarded boy to the east of us. I could let him go, but it’s the principle of the thing. Perhaps we can end it before dark. Do you think so, my dear?”

 

He was squatting beside Nadine’s chair now. He touched her cheek and she pulled away as if she had been touched with a red-hot poker. Flagg grinned and touched her again. This time she submitted, shuddering.

 

“The moon,” Flagg said, delighted. He sprang to his feet. “If the helicopters don’t spot him before dark, they’ll have the moon tonight. Why, I’ll bet he’s biking right up the middle of I-15 right now, in broad daylight. Expecting the old woman’s God to watch out for him. But she’s dead, too, isn’t she, my dear?” Flagg laughed delightedly, the laugh of a happy child. “And her God is, too, I suspect. Everything is going to work out well. And Randy Flagg is going to be a da-da.”

 

He touched her cheek again. She moaned like a hurt animal.

 

Lloyd licked his dry lips. “I’ll push off now, if that’s okay.”

 

“Fine, Lloyd, fine.” The dark man did not look around; he was staring raptly into Nadine’s face. “Everything is going well. Very well.”

 

Lloyd left as quickly as he could, almost running. In the elevator it all caught up with him and he had to push the EMERGENCY STOP button as hysterics overwhelmed him. He laughed and cried for nearly five minutes. When the storm had passed, he felt a little better.

 

He’s not falling apart, he told himself. There are a few little problems, but he’s on top of them. The ballgame will probably be over by the first of October, and surely by the fifteenth. Everything’s starting to go good, just like he said, and never mind that he almost killed me… never mind that he seems stranger than ever…

 

Lloyd got the call from Stan Bailey at Indian Springs fifteen minutes later. Stan was nearly hysterical between his fury at Trash and his fear of the dark man.

 

Carl Hough and Bill Jamieson had taken off from the Springs at 6:02 P.M. to run a recon mission east of Vegas. One of their other trainee pilots, Cliff Benson, had been riding with Carl as an observer.

 

At 6:12 P.M. both helicopters had blown up in the air. Stunned though he had been, Stan had sent five men over to Hangar 9, where two other skimmers and three large Baby Huey copters were stored. They found explosive taped to all five of the remaining choppers, and incendiary fuses rigged to simple kitchen timers. The fuses were not the same as the ones Trash had rigged to the fuel trucks, but they were very similar. There was not much room for doubt.

 

“It was the Trashcan Man,” Stan said. “He went hogwild. Jesus Christ only knows what else he’s wired up to explode out here.”

 

“Check everything,” Lloyd said. His heartbeat was rapid and thready with fear. Adrenaline boiled through his body, and his eyes felt as if they were in danger of popping from his head. “Check everything! You get every man jack out there and go from one end to the other of that cock-knocking base. You hear me, Stan?”

 

“Why bother?”

 

“Why bother? ” Lloyd screamed. “Do I have to draw you a picture, shitheels? What’s the big dude gonna say if the whole base—”

 

“All our pilots are dead,” Stan said softly. “Don’t you get it, Lloyd? Even Cliff, and he wasn’t very fucking good. We’ve got six guys that aren’t even close to soloing and no teachers. What do we need those jets for now, Lloyd?”

 

And he hung up, leaving Lloyd to sit thunderstruck, finally realizing.

 
---

 

Yes. The beautiful surety was still evaporating. When had that evaporation begun? He could not say, not for sure. All he knew was that things were getting flaky. Lloyd knew it too. He could see it in the way that Lloyd looked at him. It might not be a bad idea if Lloyd had an accident before the winter was out. He was asshole buddies with too many of the people in the palace guard, people like Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott. Even Burlson, who had spilled that business about the red list. He had thought idly about skinning Paul Burlson alive for that.

 

But if Lloyd had known about the red list, none of this would have —

 

“Shut up,” he muttered. “Just… shut… up!”

 

But the thought wouldn’t go away that easily. Why hadn’t he given Lloyd the names of the top-echelon Free Zone people? He didn’t know, couldn’t remember. It seemed there had been a perfectly good reason at the time, but the more he tried to grasp it, the more it slipped through his fingers. Had it only been a sly-stupid decision not to put too many of his eggs in one basket—a feeling that not too many secrets should be stored with any one person, even a person as stupid and loyal as Lloyd Henreid?

 

An expression of bewilderment rippled across his face. Had he been making such stupid decisions all along?

 

And just how loyal was Lloyd, anyway? That expression in his eyes—

---

 

Whitney Horgan found Lloyd in his room, lying on the big round bed he had most recently shared with Dayna Jurgens. There was a large gin and tonic balanced on his bare chest. He was staring solemnly up at his reflection in the overhead mirror.

 

“Come on in,” he said when he saw Whitney. “Don’t stand on ceremony, for Chrissake. Don’t bother to knock. Bastard.” It came out as bassard.

 

“You drunk, Lloyd?” Whitney asked cautiously.

 

“Nope. Not yet. But I’m gettin there.”

 

“Is he here?”

 

“Who? Fearless Leader?” Lloyd sat up. “He’s around someplace. The Midnight Rambler.” He laughed and lay back down.

 

Whitney said in a low voice, “You want to watch what you’re saying. You know it’s not a good idea to hit the hard stuff when he’s—”

 

“Fuck it.”

 

“Remember what happened to Hec Drogan. And Strellerton.”

 

Lloyd nodded. “You’re right. The walls have ears. The fucking walls have ears. You ever hear that saying?”

 

“Yeah, once or twice. It’s a true saying around here, Lloyd.”

 

“You bet.” Lloyd suddenly sat up and threw his drink across the room. The glass shattered. “There’s one for the sweeper, right, Whitney?”

 

“You okay, Lloyd?”

 

“I’m all right. You want a gin and tonic?”

 

Whitney hesitated for a moment. “Naw. I don’t like them without the lime.”

 

“Hey, Jesus, don’t say no just because of that! I got lime. Comes out of a little squeeze bottle.” Lloyd went over to the bar and held up a plastic ReaLime. “Looks just like the Green Giant’s left testicle. Funny, huh?”

 

“Does it taste like lime?”

 

“Sure,” Lloyd said morosely. “What do you think it tastes like? Fuckin Cheerios? So what do you say? Be a man and have a drink with me.”

 

“Well… okay.”

 

“We’ll have them by the window and take in the view.”

 

“No,” Whitney said, harshly and abruptly. Lloyd paused on his way to the bar, his face suddenly paling. He looked toward Whitney, and for a moment their eyes met.

 

“Yeah, okay,” Lloyd said. “Sorry, man. Poor taste.”

 

“That’s okay.”

 

But it wasn’t okay, and both of them knew it. The woman Flagg had introduced as his “bride” had taken a high dive the day before. Lloyd remembered Ace High saying that Dayna couldn’t jump from the balcony because the windows didn’t open. But the penthouse had a sundeck. Guess they must have thought none of the real high rollers—Arabs, most of them—would ever take the dive. A lot they knew.

 

He fixed Whitney a gin and tonic and they sat and drank in silence for a while. Outside, the sun was going down in a red glare. At last Whitney said in a voice almost too low to be heard: “Do you really think she went on her own?”

 

Lloyd shrugged. “What does it matter? Sure. I think she dived. Wouldn’t you, if you was married to him? You ready?”

 

Whitney looked at his glass and saw with some surprise that he was indeed ready. He handed it to Lloyd, who took it over to the bar. Lloyd was pouring the gin freehand, and Whitney had a nice buzz on.

 

Again they drank in silence for a while, watching the sun go down.

 

“What do you hear about that guy Cullen?” Whitney asked finally.

 

“Nothing. Doodley-squat. El-zilcho. I don’t hear nothing, Barry don’t hear nothing. Nothing from Route 40, from Route 30, from Route 2 and 74 and I-15. Nothing from the back roads. They’re all covered and they’re all nothing. He’s out in the desert someplace, and if he keeps moving at night and if he can figure out how to keep moving east, he’s going to slip through. And what does it matter, anyhow? What can he tell them?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“I don’t either. Let him go, that’s what I say.”

 

Whitney felt uncomfortable. Lloyd was getting perilously close to criticizing the boss again. His buzz-on was stronger, and he was glad. Maybe soon he would find the nerve to say what he had come here to say.

 

“I’ll tell you something,” Lloyd said, leaning forward. “He’s losing his stuff. You ever hear that fucking saying? It’s the eighth inning and he’s losing his stuff and there’s no-fucking-body warming up in the bullpen.”

 

“Lloyd, I—”

 

“You ready?”

 

“Sure, I guess.”

 

Lloyd made them new drinks. He handed one to Whitney, and a little shiver went through him as he sipped. It was almost raw gin.

 

“Losing his stuff,” Lloyd said, returning to his text. “First Dayna, then this guy Cullen. His own wife—if that’s what she was—goes and takes a dive. Do you think her double-fucking-gainer from the penthouse balcony was in his game plan?”

 

“We shouldn’t be talking about it.”

 

“And Trashcan Man. Look what that guy did all by himself. With fiends like that, who needs enemas? That’s what I’d like to know.”

 

“Lloyd—”

 

Lloyd was shaking his head. “I don’t understand it at all. Everything was going so good, right up to the night he came and said the old lady was dead over there in the Free Zone. He said the last obstacle was out of our way. But that’s when things started to get funny.”

 

“Lloyd, I really don’t think we should be—”

 

“Now I just don’t know. We can take em by land assault next spring, I guess. We sure as shit can’t go before then. But by next spring, God knows what they might have rigged up over there, you know? We were going to hit them before they could think up any funny surprises, and now we can’t. Plus, holy God on His throne, there’s Trashy to think about. He’s out there in the desert ramming around someplace, and I sure as hell—”

 

“Lloyd,” Whitney said in a low, choked voice. “Listen to me.”

 

Lloyd leaned forward, concerned. “What? What’s the trouble, old hoss?”

 

“I didn’t even know if I’d have the guts to ask you,” Whitney said. He was squeezing his glass compulsively. “Me and Ace High and Ronnie Sykes and Jenny Engstrom. We’re cutting loose. You want to come? Christ, I must be crazy telling you this, with you so close to him.”

 

“Cutting loose? Where are you going?”

 

“South America, I guess. Brazil. That ought to be just about far enough.” He paused, struggling, then plunged on. “A lot of people have been leaving. Well, maybe not a lot, but quite a few, and there’s more every day. They don’t think Flagg can cut it. Some are going north, up to Canada. That’s too frigging cold for me. But I got to get out. I’d go east if I thought they’d have me. And if I was sure we could get through.” Whitney stopped abruptly and looked at Lloyd miserably. It was the face of a man who thinks he has gone much too far.

 

“You’re all right,” Lloyd said softly. “I ain’t going to blow the whistle on you, old hoss.”

 

“It’s just… all gone bad here,” Whitney said miserably.

 

“When you planning to go?” Lloyd asked.

 

Whitney looked at him with narrow suspicion.

 

“Aw, forget I asked,” Lloyd said. “You ready?”

 

“Not yet,” Whitney said, looking into his glass.

 

“I am.” He went to the bar. With his back to Whitney he said, “I couldn’t.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“Couldn’t! ” Lloyd said sharply, and turned back to Whitney. “I owe him something. I owe him a lot. He got me out of a bad jam back in Phoenix and I been with him since then. Seems longer than it really is. Sometimes it seems like forever.”

 

“I’ll bet.”

 

“But it’s more than that. He’s done something to me, made me brighter or something. I don’t know what it is, but I ain’t the same man I was, Whitney. Nothing like. Before… him … I was nothing but a minor leaguer. Now he’s got me running things here, and I do okay. It seems like I think better. Yeah, he’s made me brighter.” Lloyd lifted the flawed stone from his chest, looked at it briefly, then dropped it again. He wiped his hand against his pants as though it had touched something nasty. “I know I ain’t no genius now. I have to write everything I’m s’posed to do in a notebook or I forget it. But with him behind me I can give orders and most times things turn out right. Before, all I could do was take orders and get in jams. I’ve changed… and he changed me. Yeah, it seems a lot longer than it really is.

 

“When we got to Vegas, there were only sixteen people here. Ronnie was one of them; so was Jenny and poor old Hec Drogan. They were waiting for him. When we got into town, Jenny Engstrom got down on those pretty knees of hers and kissed his boots. I bet she never told you that in bed.” He smiled crookedly at Whitney. “Now she wants to cut and run. Well, I don’t blame her, or you either. But it sure doesn’t take much to sour a good operation, does it?”

 

“You’re going to stick?”

 

“To the very end, Whitney. His or mine. I owe him that.” He didn’t add that he still had enough faith in the dark man to believe that Whitney and the others would end up riding crosstrees, more likely than not. And there was something else. Here he was Flagg’s second-in-command. What could he be in Brazil? Why, Whitney and Ronnie were both brighter than he was. He and Ace High would end up low chickens, and that wasn’t to Lloyd’s taste. Once he wouldn’t have minded, but things had changed. And when your head changed, he was finding out, it most always changed forever.

 

“Well, it might work out for all of us,” Whitney said lamely.

 

“Sure,” Lloyd said, and thought: But I wouldn’t want to be walking in your shoes if it comes out right for Flagg after all. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when he finally has time to notice you down there in Brazil. Riding a crosstree might be the least of your worries then…

 

Lloyd raised his glass. “A toast, Whitney.”

 

Whitney raised his own glass.

 

“Nobody gets hurt,” Lloyd said. “That’s my toast. Nobody gets hurt.”

 

“Man, I’ll drink to that,” Whitney said fervently, and they both did.

 

Whitney left soon after. Lloyd kept on drinking. He passed out around nine-thirty and slept soddenly on the round bed. There were no dreams, and that was almost worth the price of the next day’s hangover.

---

 

“I’d like you to meet my associate,” Flagg said with a giggle. “Lloyd Henreid, meet Glen Bateman, sociologist, Free Zone Committee member, and single existing member of the Free Zone think tank now that Nick Andros is dead.”

 

“Meetcha,” Lloyd mumbled.

 

“How’s your arthritis, Glen?” Flagg asked. His tone was commiserating, but his eyes sparkled with high glee and secret knowledge.

 

Glen opened and closed his hands rapidly, smiling back at Flagg. No one would ever know what an effort it took to maintain that gentle smile.

 

The intrinsic worth of the clay!

 

“Fine,” he said. “Much better for sleeping indoors, thank you.”

 

Flagg’s smile faltered a bit. Glen caught just a glimpse of narrow surprise and anger. Of fear?

 

“I’ve decided to let you go,” he said briskly. His smile sprang forth again, radiant and vulpine. Lloyd uttered a little gasp of surprise, and Flagg turned to him. “Haven’t I, Lloyd?”

 

“Uh… sure,” Lloyd said. “Sure nuff.”

 

“Well, fine,” Glen said easily. He could feel the arthritis sinking deeper and deeper into his joints, numbing them like ice, swelling them like fire.

 

“You’ll be given a small motorbike and you may drive back at your leisure.”

 

“Of course I couldn’t go without my friends.”

 

“Of course not. And all you have to do is ask. Get down on your knees and ask me.”

 

Glen laughed heartily. He threw back his head and laughed long and hard. And as he laughed, the pain in his joints began to abate. He felt better, stronger, in control again.

 

“Oh, you’re a card,” he said. “I tell you what you do. Why don’t you find a nice big sandpile, get yourself a hammer, and pound all that sand right up your ass?”

 

Flagg’s face grew dark. The smile slipped away. His eyes, previously as dark as the jet stone Lloyd wore, now seemed to gleam yellowly. He reached out his hand to the locking mechanism on the door and wrapped his fingers around it. There was an electric buzzing sound. Fire leaped out between his fingers, and there was a hot smell in the air. The lockbox fell to the floor, smoking and black. Lloyd Henreid cried out. The dark man grabbed the bars and threw the cell door back on its track.

 

“Stop laughing.”

 

Glen laughed harder.

 

“Stop laughing at me! ”

 

“You’re nothing!” Glen said, wiping his streaming eyes and still chuckling. “Oh pardon me… it’s just that we were all so frightened… we made such a business out of you… I’m laughing as much at our own foolishness as at your regrettable lack of substance…”

 

“Shoot him, Lloyd.” Flagg had turned to the other man. His face was working horribly. His hands were hooked into predator’s claws.

 

“Oh, kill me yourself if you’re going to kill me,” Glen said. “Surely you’re capable. Touch me with your finger and stop my heart. Make the sign of the inverted cross and give me a massive brain embolism. Bring down the lightning from the overhead socket to cleave me in two. Oh… oh dear… oh dear me!”

 

Glen collapsed onto the cell cot and rocked back and forth, consumed with delicious laughter.

 

“Shoot him! ” the dark man roared at Lloyd.

 

Pale, shaking with fear, Lloyd fumbled the pistol out of his belt, almost dropped it, then tried to point it at Glen. He had to use both hands.

 

Glen looked at Lloyd, still smiling. He might have been at a faculty cocktail party back in the Brain Ghetto at Woodsville, New Hampshire, recovering from a good joke, now ready to turn the conversation back into more serious channels of reflection.

 

“If you have to shoot somebody, Mr. Henreid, shoot him.”

 

“Do it now, Lloyd.”

 

Lloyd blindly pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a tremendous crash in the enclosed space. The echoes bounced furiously back and forth. But the bullet only chipped concrete two inches from Glen’s right shoulder, ricocheted, struck something else, and whined off again.

 

“Can’t you do anything right?” Flagg roared. “Shoot him, you moron! Shoot him! He’s standing right in front of you!”

 

“I’m trying—”

 

Glen’s smile had not changed, and he had only flinched a little at the gunshot. “I repeat, if you must shoot somebody, shoot him. He’s really not human at all, you know. I once described him to a friend as the last magician of rational thought, Mr. Henreid. That was more correct than I knew. But he’s losing his magic now. It’s slipping away from him and he knows it. And you know it, too. Shoot him now and save us all God knows how much bloodshed and dying.”

 

Flagg’s face had grown very still. “Shoot one of us, anyhow, Lloyd,” he said. “I got you out of jail when you were dying of starvation. It’s guys like this that you wanted to get back at. Little guys who talk big.”

 

Lloyd said: “Mister, you don’t fool me. It’s like Randy Flagg says.”

 

“But he lies. You know he lies.”

 

“He told me more of the truth than anyone else bothered to in my whole lousy life,” Lloyd said, and shot Glen three times. Glen was driven backward, twisted and turned like a ragdoll. Blood flew in the dim air. He struck the cot, bounced, and rolled onto the floor. He managed to get up on one elbow.

 

“It’s all right, Mr. Henreid,” he whispered. “You don’t know any better.”

 

“Shut up, you mouthy old bastard! ” Lloyd screamed. He fired again and Glen Bateman’s face disappeared. He fired again and the body jumped lifelessly. Lloyd shot him yet again. He was crying. The tears rolled down his angry, sunburned cheeks. He was remembering the rabbit he had forgotten and left to eat its own paws. He was remembering Poke, and the people in the white Connie, and Gorgeous George. He was remembering the Phoenix jail, and the rat, and how he hadn’t been able to eat the ticking out of his mattress. He was remembering Trask, and how Trask’s leg had started to look like a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner after a while. He pulled the trigger again, but the pistol only uttered a sterile click.

 

“All right,” Flagg said softly. “All right. Well done. Well done, Lloyd.”

 

Lloyd dropped the gun on the floor and shrank away from Flagg. “Don’t you touch me!” he cried. “I didn’t do it for you!”

 

“Yes, you did,” Flagg said tenderly. “You may not think so, but you did.” He reached out and fingered the jet stone around Lloyd’s neck. He closed his hand over it, and when he opened the hand again, the stone was gone. It had been replaced with a small silver key.

 

“I promised you this, I think,” the dark man said. “In another jail. He was wrong… I keep my promises, don’t I, Lloyd?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“The others are leaving, or planning to leave. I know who they are. I know all the names. Whitney… Ken… Jenny… oh yes, I know all the names.”

 

“Then why don’t you—”

 

“Put a stop to it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to let them go. But you, Lloyd. You’re my good and faithful servant, aren’t you?”

 

“Yeah,” Lloyd whispered. The final admission. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

 

“Without me, the best you could have done was small shit, even if you had survived that jail. Correct?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“The Lauder boy knew that. He knew I could make him bigger. Taller. That’s why he was coming to me. But he was too full of thoughts… too full of…” He looked suddenly perplexed and old. Then he waved his hand impatiently, and the smile bloomed on his face again. “Perhaps it is going bad, Lloyd. Perhaps it is, for some reason not even I can understand… but the old magician has a few tricks left in him yet, Lloyd. One or two. Now listen to me. Time is short if we want to stop this… this crisis in confidence. If we want to nip it in the bud, as it were. We’ll want to finish things tomorrow with Underwood and Brentner. Now listen to me very carefully…”

 

Lloyd didn’t get to bed until past midnight, and got no sleep until the small hours of the morning. He talked to the Rat-Man. He talked to Paul Burlson. To Barry Dorgan, who agreed that what the dark man wanted could—and probably should—be done before daylight. Construction began on the front lawn of the MGM Grand around 10 P.M. on the twenty-ninth, a work party of ten men with welding arcs and hammers and bolts and a good supply of long steel pipes. They were assembling the pipes on two flatbed trucks in front of the fountain. The welding arcs soon drew a crowd.

---

 

Flagg was coming down the steps of the Grand, Lloyd Henreid beside him. Flagg was wearing jeans, a checked shirt, his jeans jacket with the two buttons on the breast pockets, and his rundown cowboy boots. In the sudden hush the sound of those bootheels clocking their way down the cement path was the only sound… a sound out of time.

 

The dark man was grinning.

 

Larry stared down at him. Flagg came to a halt between the two cages and stood looking up. His grin was darkly charming. He was a man completely in control, and Larry suddenly knew this was his watershed moment, the apotheosis of his life.

 

Flagg turned away from them and faced his people. He passed his eyes over them, and no eye would meet his. “Lloyd,” he said quietly, and Lloyd, who looked pale, haunted, and sickly, handed Flagg a paper that had been rolled up like a scroll.

 

The dark man unrolled it, held it up, and began to speak. His voice was deep, sonorous, and pleasing, spreading in the stillness like a single silver ripple on a black pond. “Know you that this is a true bill to which I, Randall Flagg, have put my name on this thirtieth day of September, the year nineteen hundred and ninety, now known as The Year One, year of the plague.”

 

“Flagg’s not your name!” Ralph roared. There was a shocked murmur from the crowd. “Why don’t you tell em your real name?”

 

Flagg took no notice.

 

“Know you that these men, Lawson Underwood and Ralph Brentner, are spies, here in Las Vegas with no good intent but rather with seditious motives, who have entered this state with stealth, and under cover of darkness—”

 

“That’s pretty good,” Larry said, “since we were coming down Route 70 in broad daylight.” He raised his voice to a shout. “They took us at noon on the Interstate, how’s that for stealth and under cover of darkness? ”

 

Flagg bore through this patiently, as if he felt that Larry and Ralph had every right to answer the charges… not that it was going to make any ultimate difference.

 

Now he continued: “Know you that the cohorts of these men were responsible for the sabotage bombing of the helicopters at Indian Springs, and therefore responsible for the deaths of Carl Hough, Bill Jamieson, and Cliff Benson. They are guilty of murder.”

 

Larry’s eyes touched those of a man standing on the front rim of the crowd. Although Larry did not know it, this was Stan Bailey, Operations Chief at Indian Springs. He saw a haze of bewilderment and surprise cover the man’s face, and saw him mouthing something ridiculous that looked like Can Man.

 

“Know you that the cohorts of these men have sent other spies among us and they have been killed. It is the sentence then that these men shall be put to death in an appropriate manner, to wit, that they shall be pulled apart. It is the duty and the responsibility of each of you to witness this punishment, so you may remember it and tell others what you have seen here today.”

 

Flagg’s grin flashed out, meant to be solicitous in this instance, but still no more warm and human than a shark’s grin.

 

“Those of you with children are excused.”

 

He turned toward the cars, which were now idling, sending out small puffs of exhaust into the morning. As he did so, there was a commotion near the front of the crowd. Suddenly a man pushed through into the clearing. He was a big man, his face nearly as pallid as his cook’s whites. The dark man had handed the scroll back to Lloyd, and Lloyd’s hands jerked convulsively when Whitney Horgan pushed into the clear. There was a clear ripping sound as the scroll tore in half.

 

“Hey, you people! ” Whitney cried.

 

A confused murmur ran through the crowd. Whitney was shaking all over, as if with a palsy. His head kept jerking toward the dark man and then away again. Flagg regarded Whitney with a ferocious smile. Dorgan started toward the cook, and Flagg motioned him back.

 

“This ain’t right! ” Whitney yelled. “You know it ain’t! ”

 

Dead silence from the crowd. They might all have been turned to gravestones.

 

Whitney’s throat worked convulsively. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a monkey on a stick.

 

“We was Americans once!” Whitney cried at last. “This ain’t how Americans act. I wasn’t so much, I’ll tell you that, nothin but a cook, but I know this ain’t how Americans act, listening to some murderin freak in cowboy boots—”

 

A horrified, rustling gasp came from these new Las Vegans. Larry and Ralph exchanged a puzzled glance.

 

“That’s what he is!” Whitney insisted. The sweat was running down his face like tears from the brushy edges of his flattop haircut. “You wanna watch these two guys ripped in two right in front of you, huh? You think that’s the way to start a new life? You think a thing like that can ever be right? I tell you you’ll have nightmares about it for the rest of your lives! ”

 

The crowd murmured its assent.

 

“We got to stop this,” Whitney said. “You know it? We got to have time to think about what… what…”

 

“Whitney.” That voice, smooth as silk, little more than a whisper, but enough to silence the cook’s faltering voice completely. He turned toward Flagg, lips moving soundlessly, his eye as fixed as a mackerel’s. Now the sweat was pouring down his face in torrents.

 

“Whitney, you should have kept still.” His voice was soft, but still it carried easily to every ear. “I would have let you go… why would I want you?”

 

Whitney’s lips moved, but still no sound came out.

 

“Come here, Whitney.”

 

“No,” Whitney whispered, and no one heard his demurral except Lloyd and Ralph and Larry and possibly Barry Dorgan. Whitney’s feet moved as if they had not heard his mouth. His sprung and mushy black loafers whispered through the grass and he moved toward the dark man like a ghost.

 

The crowd had become a slack jaw and staring eye.

 

“I knew about your plans,” the dark man said. “I knew what you meant to do before you did. And I would have let you crawl away until I was ready to take you back. Maybe in a year, maybe in ten. But that’s all behind you now, Whitney. Believe it.”

 

Whitney found his voice one last time, his words rushing out in a strangled scream. “You ain’t a man at all! You’re some kind of a… a devil! ”

 

Flagg stretched out the index finger of his left hand so that it almost touched Whitney Horgan’s chin. “Yes, that’s right,” he said so softly that no one but Lloyd and Larry Underwood heard. “I am.”

 

A blue ball of fire no bigger than the Ping-Pong ball Leo was endlessly bouncing leaped from the tip of Flagg’s finger with a faint ozone crackle.

 

An autumn wind of sighs went through those watching.

 

Whitney screamed—but didn’t move. The ball of fire lit on his chin. There was a sudden cloying smell of burning flesh. The ball moved across his mouth, fusing his lips shut, locking the scream behind Whitney’s bulging eyes. It crossed one cheek, digging a charred and instantly cauterized trench.

 

It closed his eyes.

 

It paused above his forehead and Larry heard Ralph speaking, saying the same thing over and over, and Larry joined his voice to Ralph’s, making it a litany: “I will fear no evil… I will fear no evil… I will fear no evil…”

 

The ball of fire rolled up from Whitney’s forehead and now there was a hot smell of burning hair. It rolled toward the back of his head, leaving a grotesque bald strip behind it. Whitney swayed on his feet for a moment and then fell over, mercifully facedown.

 

The crowd released a long, sibilant sound: Aaaahhhh. It was the sound people had made on the Fourth of July when the fireworks display had been particularly good. The ball of blue fire hung in the air, bigger now, too bright to look at without slitting the eyes. The dark man pointed at it and it moved slowly toward the crowd. Those in the front row—a whey-faced Jenny Engstrom was among them—shrank back.

 

In a thundering voice, Flagg challenged them. “Is there anyone else here who disagrees with my sentence? If so, let him speak now! ”

 

Deep silence greeted this.

 

Flagg seemed satisfied. “Then let—”

 

Heads began to turn away from him suddenly. A surprised murmur ran through the crowd, then rose to a babble. Flagg seemed completely caught by surprise. Now people in the crowd began to cry out, and while it was impossible to make out the words clearly, the tone was one of wonder and surprise. The ball of fire dipped and spun uncertainly.

 

The humming sound of an electric motor came to Larry’s ears. And again he caught that puzzling name tossed from mouth to mouth, never clear, never all of one piece: Man… Can Man… Trash… Trashy…

 

Someone was coming through the crowd, as if in answer to the dark man’s challenge.

 

Flagg felt terror seep into the chambers of his heart. It was a terror of the unknown and the unexpected. He had foreseen everything, even Whitney’s foolish spur-of-the-moment speech. He had foreseen everything but this. The crowd—his crowd—was parting, peeling back. There was a scream, high, clear, and freezing. Someone broke and ran. Then someone else. And then the crowd, already on an emotional hair-trigger, broke and stampeded.

 

“Hold still! ” Flagg cried at the top of his voice, but it was useless. The crowd had become a strong wind, and not even the dark man could stop the wind. Terrible, impotent rage rose in him, joining the fear and making some new and volatile mix. It had gone wrong again. In the last minute it had somehow gone wrong, like the old lawyer in Oregon, the woman slitting her throat on the windowglass… and Nadine… Nadine failing…

 

They ran, scattering to all the points of the compass, pounding across the lawn of the MGM Grand, across the street, toward the Strip. They had seen the final guest, arrived at last like some grim vision out of a horror tale. They had seen, perhaps, the raddled face of some final awful retribution.

 

And they had seen what the returning wanderer had brought with him.

 

As the crowd melted, Randall Flagg also saw, as did Larry and Ralph and a frozen Lloyd Henreid, who was still holding the torn scroll in his hands.

 

It was Donald Merwin Elbert, now known as the Trashcan Man, now and forever, world without end, hallelujah, amen.

 

He was behind the wheel of a long, dirty electric cart. The cart’s heavy-duty bank of batteries was nearly drained dry. The cart was humming and buzzing and lurching. Trashcan Man bobbed back and forth on the open seat like a mad marionette.

 

He was in the last stages of radiation sickness. His hair was gone. His arms, poking out of the tatters of his shirt, were covered with open running sores. His face was a cratered red soup from which one desert-faded blue eye peered with a terrible, pitiful intelligence. His teeth were gone. His nails were gone. His eyelids were frayed flaps.

 

He looked like a man who had driven his electric cart out of the dark and burning subterranean mouth of hell itself.

 

Flagg watched him come, frozen. His smile was gone. His high, rich color was gone. His face was suddenly a window made of pale clear glass.

 

Trashcan Man’s voice bubbled ecstatically up from his thin chest:

 

“I brought it… I brought you the fire… please… I’m sorry…”

 

It was Lloyd who moved. He took one step forward, then another. “Trashy… Trash, baby…” His voice was a croak.

 

That single eye moved, painfully seeking Lloyd out. “Lloyd? That you?”

 

“It’s me, Trash.” Lloyd was shaking violently all over, the way Whitney had been shaking. “Hey, what you got there? Is it—”

 

“It’s the Big One,” Trash said happily. “It’s the A-bomb.” He began to rock back and forth on the seat of the electric cart like a convert at a revival meeting. “The A-bomb, the Big One, the big fire, my life for you! ”

 

“Take it away, Trash,” Lloyd whispered. “It’s dangerous. It’s… it’s hot. Take it away…”

 

“Make him get rid of it, Lloyd,” the dark man who was now the pale man whined. “Make him take it back where he got it. Make him—”

 

Trashcan’s one operative eye grew puzzled. “Where is he?” he asked, and then his voice rose to an agonized howl. “Where is he? He’s gone! Where is he? What did you do to him? ”

 

Lloyd made one last supreme effort. “Trash, you’ve got to get rid of that thing. You—”

 

And suddenly Ralph shrieked: “Larry! Larry! The Hand of God! ” Ralph’s face was transported in a terrible joy. His eyes shone. He was pointing into the sky.

 

Larry looked up. He saw the ball of electricity Flagg had flicked from the end of his finger. It had grown to a tremendous size. It hung in the sky, jittering toward Trashcan Man, giving off sparks like hair. Larry realized dimly that the air was now so full of electricity that every hair on his own body was standing on end.

 

And the thing in the sky did look like a hand.

 

“Noooo! ” the dark man wailed.

 

Larry looked at him… but Flagg was no longer there. He had a bare impression of something monstrous standing in front of where Flagg had been. Something slumped and hunched and almost without shape—something with enormous yellow eyes slit by dark cat’s pupils.

 

Then it was gone.

 

Larry saw Flagg’s clothes—the jacket, the jeans, the boots—standing upright with nothing in them. For a split second they held the shape of the body that had been inside them. And then they collapsed.

 

The crackling blue fire in the air rushed at the yellow electric cart that Trashcan Man had somehow driven back from the Nellis Range. He had lost hair and thrown up blood and finally vomited out his own teeth as the radiation sickness sank deeper and deeper into him, yet he had never faltered in his resolve to bring it back to the dark man… you could say that he had never flagged in his determination.

 

The blue ball of fire flung itself into the back of the cart, seeking what was there, drawn to it.

 

“Oh shit we’re all fucked! ” Lloyd Henreid cried. He put his hands over his head and fell to his knees.

 

Oh God, thank God, Larry thought. I will fear no evil, I will f

 

Silent white light filled the world.

 

And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire.